Yeah totally agreed. Swift is rife with way more special behaviours/magic to try to smooth over sloppy programming and just make stuff work. There's even a standard term for pushing a problem into the compiler: compiler heroics. Where heroics fall down, the language needs extra annotations to help the compiler out (@escaping closures is the most obvious).
Swift also has a lot of slightly more ergonomic but otherwise largely unnecessary features: initializers vs static funcs, guards vs ifs, throws vs returning an enum, fileprivate vs private.
Moving to working on Swift from Rust has led to me really appreciating how simple a lot of Rust really is. There's a lot of "oh it's literally just X".
But the lifetime thing is a huge empowerer of Rust being simpler everywhere else. It means a lot more stuff can be "just X", because X can be made safe.
Swift also has a lot of slightly more ergonomic but otherwise largely unnecessary features: initializers vs static funcs, guards vs ifs, throws vs returning an enum, fileprivate vs private.
Moving to working on Swift from Rust has led to me really appreciating how simple a lot of Rust really is. There's a lot of "oh it's literally just X".
But the lifetime thing is a huge empowerer of Rust being simpler everywhere else. It means a lot more stuff can be "just X", because X can be made safe.