This is a really interesting observation: "Stateless programs like command line tools or low-abstraction domains like embedded programming will have less friction with the borrow checker than domains with a lot of interconnected state like apps, stateful programs, or complex turn-based games."
In my book [0] teaching Rust, I manage to completely avoid using lifetimes. Perhaps this is because it reimplements a command line utility (head, wc, cat, ...) from the original BSD sources in each chapter and none of them are stateful. Most of the classic Unix utilities just process streams of bytes and barely use data structures at all. Many don't even call malloc().
It feels like Rust is a good match for the problem domain but I never made the connection with the stateless nature of these tools before. This bodes well for eventually replacing the coreutils with modern Rust implementations.