I find this whole "fighting the borrow checker" thing a tad inflated. I personally don't "fight" it anymore, because it's a simple rule to anyone who's familiar with pointer arithmetic.

Also the compiler usually tells you what is it exactly that you screwed up this time and how to get out of this mess, which cannot be said about C++.

In absence of a garbage collector, what people don't get is that it's really easy to screw up by creating race conditions or memory leaks.

If fighting the borrow checker is annoying, that's because you don't get memory safety otherwise.

The vast majority of vulnerabilities in the wild are created because of sloppy usage of C / C++, which is basically unavoidable in absence of expensive static analyzers that become as annoying as Rust, while not being as good.