People definitely use it for higher-level things, and it's nice there as well - not the same level of comfort as a garbage-collected language, but still very ni

People definitely use it for higher-level things, and it's nice there as well - not the same level of comfort as a garbage-collected language, but still very nice. When writing code that isn't that performance-sensitive, cloning is often an option (and gets you past a lot of grief with lifetimes), so is reference counting, etc. Rust's set of rules just means you can never, for example, accidentally hold a reference to a value that's been freed - it'll error out, and then you can pick whether you meant to borrow it, to share ownership with reference counting, or to clone it.