This description doesn't match my experience of writing Rust at all. During the exploratory phase of my projects, I very rarely run into nontrivial lifetime is

This description doesn't match my experience of writing Rust at all. During the exploratory phase of my projects, I very rarely run into nontrivial lifetime issues, and when I do, I can just put whatever data into an Arc and then it just works. Most of my exploratory code is just objects that own their data. Later in a project, while doing a bunch of refactoring to handle performance, logging, etc. , I have a much easier time letting the compiler tell me when I've made mistakes with a value's lifetime rather than trying to keep the whole program in my head for the duration of the refactor. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about lifetime issues during either phase of my projects. Mostly I just write the same sort of thing that I'd have written in other languages, and the compiler tells me when I've made a mistake.