People write non-trivial code all the time without worrying about that sort of thing. Quite a lot can be done with plain tree structures. In the real world, your data is flat and even your conventions for interpreting it as non-flat (such as, say, JSON) only create trees that perhaps simulate back-links with another informal protocol.
Sigh. The whole premise of the linked article is, in fact, that people hit validation problems with the borrow checker early on when learning rust and that attention is needed to "flatten the learning curve" to assist their understanding of what we all agree is a unique and somewhat confusing set of semantics relative to competing languages.
Rust flaming is just so terribly exhausting. No matter how reasonable and obvious a point is there's always someone willing to go to the mattresses in a fourty-comment digression about how Rust is infallible.
... Would it help you to know that I don't even use Rust (although I'm interested in picking it up), and in fact have complained on HN before about program performance and other features being invalidly attributed to "it's written in Rust"? Especially in the Python ecosystem, that being my primary programming language?
I'm not making anything like the argument you seem to think I am. I'm only making a pragmatic observation about what real-world coding is like, based on my own experience.
You should try picking up Rust, and then, based on your Python experience, see how quickly you run into one of those cases that GP is talking about. It's unlikely to take long.
