Two main components of Rust's approach to memory management are i) the imposing/exploiting of scope lifetimes on objects and references, and ii) the restriction that a mutable reference may not co-exist with any other references (to the same object).

I suggest that with C++ there is kind of the option of embracing the former, without so much of the latter, to achieve a performance-safety combination that is closer to Rust's than current "modern C++" practices. That's sort of the premise of the SaferCPlusPlus library [1]. If you're a C++ programmer, the barrier to adoption is low. Though without a "borrow checker" or something equivalent, you wouldn't be able to match Rust's performance-safety combination in all cases.

[1] shameless plug: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus

edit: edited the link

Yeah, I totally hear you. I shared that opinion too, but, surprisingly enough, it seems to some degree that that's in the minority. Or at least, there's a pretty significant number of people who do "love Ruts for its other modern features and merely tolerate the new approach to memory management."

I feel that way myself now, but figured that I was just too close to have a mainstream opinion about it :)