I dunno, I work in C++ in games and we spend way too much time thinking about how to manage memory. It's not a breeze at all.

You would do that even with a GC language like Java. The serious performance code paths in Java also do meticulous memory management to minimize allocations, GC costs, and utilize off-heap memory (Netty comes immediately to mind).

In my opinion it’s the worst of both worlds at that point—you’ve got to manually manage memory and tip toe around the runtime.

You're not wrong, but that's a bit of an unfair comparison.

You're likely talking about work on custom memory allocators and impact on real time performance. In the hosted services domain this isn't so much an issue. Nobody's doing that in Java, and you likewise wouldn't care much if writing the same type of service in Rust.

Rust very much enables you to write high level, Java-style code. It's not bad code, nor is it difficult to write.

Do the developers thing about these things once, or do the operations people think about them continuously, and for all time?