The loudest voices in Rust that I know (pcwalton, steveklabnik, burntsushi, on HN for example) clearly acknowledge that Rust makes tradeoffs.

No one denies that there are "simpler ways to achieve memory safety". Stop-the-world garbage collection and reference-counting are exactly just that. Vale uses generational references, which, IIUC, has both memory and runtime costs when compared to tracking lifetimes.