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Some of the things that makes Rust hard to wrap you head around are the very things this post elucidates.

The principles exposed by the language, like lifetimes and mutability, are easy enough to understand. Yet despite understanding them, you get into epic battles with the borrow checker where the new shiny rules you've just learnt turn out to be little help in figuring out why the compiler accepts some code but rejects something similar.

You can't figure it out because these inconceivable types are not written down or explained anywhere. Instead if you are lucky you get examples of what works and what doesn't along with a hand wavy description of why, but usually it's just you versus the compiler error message. Since you don't have a concrete description of what is going to help you reason about what it likely to be accepted, you resort to experimentation to try and find what the compiler does accept. The experimental route takes ages.

If you survive enough bruising rounds of this, you will build up an empirical list of ways of working in Rust. If not, you give up on the language. To be fair, I don't think it takes a huge amount of time in the scheme or things, certainly less time than it takes to know your way around a languages standard library as that can take a month or two. However for those of us with a few languages under our belts, the time it does take comes as a shock. I'm used to it taking a few hours to become acquainted with the syntax and semantics or a new language, not finding myself still having battles with the compiler weeks later.

IMO, if the Rust doco did explain the language things the way this post does, it would make the learning it much easier.