I haven't written a lot of Rust, but what manual memory management are you referring to? As far as I can tell, the whole point of the language is that you don't have to worry about that if you listen to the compiler.
It's sort of the opposite, it's that the compiler won't permit you to neglect any aspect of memory management until it deems your work passable. You think about memory management even more than you would in most languages. The result is you get some guarantees about correctness.
You may have to think about it, but you certainly aren't doing the work of e.g. writing malloc and free statements.
You have to think about it. You don't have to worry about it.
This sounds like Rust propaganda! It's too slick...
it sounds slick, but for the first few hours you'll think that hell is a nicer place than here because the borrow checker won't be there. it takes a while for it to become slick again and only then you really start to appreciate the language. theory vs practive and all that.