The annotations have, for the most part, faded into the background for me. I don't find them to be particularly pervasive in the code I write, and when I do need them, it's usually to fix a reasonably straight-forward case where the compiler failed to elide them. With that said, in the years I've been using Rust, I have committed one or two lifetime-related bugs. (No memory unsafety resulted, of course, but it did result in data being annotated with a shorter-than-actual lifetime.)

> In short, I thought Rust was "we solved the pain of this difficult thing."

Part of the pain that Rust purports to solve is the significant reduction (and debugging thereof) of memory unsafety errors. In return, you must deal with the pain of an ownership and borrowing system, which might present challenges to patterns you may have used in another language. The benefit is that you have a compiler to tell you when you've mis-stepped instead of an end user filing a bug report (or worse).