I like the analogy to learning a language. The immersion is very important. I did exactly what you said. I didn't read many tutorials I just sat down and rewrote a project in Rust. I don't use lifetimes properly right now (I abuse cloning many times) but I am happy with the progress.

Another thing worth mentioning is that while being a great language Rust is still a tool. Designing the architecture, algorithms, logic of the system, refactoring are much more difficult than the language itself in my opinion.