It does take time and effort to really internalize these rules. But eventually you should be able to have a mental model of how ownership and borrowing work; consider what owns the data, if it can be borrowed within statically known scopes, will it need to mix sharing and mutation, and then apply Rust-specific types and design patterns to match.

Conversely, there are things that you just can't do, like using temporary references for parent-child relationships. Knowing this will save you time from even trying.

Perhaps learning materials need to be more explicit about it. For example, I suspect lots of people are discovering the limitation of self-referential structs the hard way.