It does in a way use a limited subset. Specifically, the borrow checker is rarely a concern since Bevys ECS storage abstracts that mostly away from the user.

You can't code in Rust by just trying things and seeing if they work, you'll get very frustrated. This approach works for learning other languages but you'll hit a wall with Rust. Gotta read the book.

On the contrary, about 50% of my time with Rust is spent throwing shit at the wall and seeing if it works. The great thing is that the compiler will probably tell you that what you're doing is garbage and you might want to consider redesigning, which is where the other 50% goes. If you hack works, great, just need to get it through code review, which will probably reject most other garbage. If it doesn't, back to the drawing board, and you won't have spent the time pestering someone to read your hackjob.

You absolutely need to learn Rust first. Bevy uses it's full feature set.

I learned Rust (and frankly, most of programming) with Bevy :) It was a good experience, although I definitely recommend learning the basics from the Rust Book as you go to reduce frustration and confusion.

In simple game code you don't need to write your own traits, use unsafe, and like laundmo says, the borrow checker pains are way easier than in most Rust codebases because there's already a nice architecture in place.

I've been using Bevy to push me into learning Rust and it's working well for me, I haven't had to worry about lifetimes much and even without understanding references for a while I could still tinker with stuff.