As someone who loves SML/OCaml and has written primarily Rust over the past ~10 years, I totally agree - I use it as a modern and ergonomic ML with best-in-class tooling, libraries, and performance. Lifetimes are cool, and I use them when needed, but they aren't the reason I use Rust at all. I would use Rust with a GC instead of lifetimes too.
Either a lot of clones or a lot of reference counted pointers. Especially if your point of comparison is a GC language, this is much less of a crime than some people think
When I mean "use" them, I mean make heavy use of them, e.g. structs or functions annotated with multiple lifetimes, data flows designed to borrow data, e.g. You can often get by just with `clone` and lifetime elision, and if you don't need to eke out that last bit of performance, it's fine.
