There is an easy subset of Rust, namely the "pure functional" subset that doesn't use reference types at all and just passes everything by value. The use of & ("shared") references is only marginally harder. All of these features can be introduced step-by-step, together with basic notions that are not exclusive to any programming language. I'm aware that this is not how Rust is generally taught, but it's worthwhile to attempt such an approach.
Rust wouldn't be a bad language if humans were able to take it in all at once. The problem is, nobody learns like that and Rust is very hard to iterate on if you don't know a lot of the key concepts.
The problem with this is you'll necessarily have to unlearn something or be frustrated when you achieve some level of proficiency in other languages since it still requires all those concepts which don't exist anywhere else.