I can confirm. I started learning Rust as a second language right after Python and it was hard to make sense of anything. Why the hell some values have the Copy trait and others don't? Then I learned C and now I have good mental model of how memory is allocated and Rust feels okay. I just don't like that it hides away the complexity because when it does not work, you don't have the means to understand why, you just know did not follow the rules that you never remember anyways because they don't make sense to you. C has quirks too and the learning can also be steep, but it forces you to understand how things are working under the hood. Will continue to learn Rust but I have high hopes for the Zig language which seems more approachable with C in mind (rather than C++ which Rust is said to be a replacement for).

Agreed, I've seen lots of posts about the learning curve so I went in expecting a lot of pain. I've been pleasantly surprised so far.