I don't disagree with your premise, but I disagree with the claim that Rust doesn't automatically manage memory. Rust absolutely does automatic memory managemen

I don't disagree with your premise, but I disagree with the claim that Rust doesn't automatically manage memory. Rust absolutely does automatic memory management - that's one of the main motivations behind the ownership/lifetime system. For instance, when you create a vector, the standard library will automatically allocate, re-allocate, clone and/or deallocate the buffer when necessary. What Rust doesn't do is to decide for you how to pass or share that memory between different parts of your program - it just provides you with options. One could argue that this should also be under the automatic memory management -umbrella, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. But I don't think it's fair to say that Rust doesn't have automatic memory management. I would also argue that for many simpler programs you can get away with basically paying no attention to memory management. If your program is a simple pipeline which reads some input, applies some processing and produces an output, your code might not look substantially different from any GC-based language. That doesn't mean Rust is an easy language or even a good idea to use for these kinds of programs, but I would argue that a developer proficient in both Rust and Python could write the same (simple, pipeline-like) program in either language with comparable time and effort.