The Rust way to do low level programming is easier for those that bring some experience from Wirth languages approach to systems programming, instead of being tainted by C.
In a way it is like meeting an old friend, a kind of Ada/Modula-2/Object Pascal coupled with the borrow checker and more curly friendly syntax.
I had to learn some low level memory models before I could really grok rust. I understood a bit of C++ but it wasn't until I found the talk about memory structures for rust/c++ that I really caught on. I can understand why knowing existing programming techniques might cause a struggle.
It’s almost as if you need to completely unlearn behaviours before you can learn the “the rust way”.
I think the standard path is this “book” (GitHub repo): https://github.com/nrc/r4cppp