I wonder if anyone here has more experience to know how well it has worked?
One massive advantage of Rust is that they started with borrow checking from the beginning. I think one thing that often gets understated in these discussions is how much it matters to have your entire ecosystem using a set of safe abstractions. This is a major drag for C++, and I suspect that even if the language went a route like D they'd still have gaping safety holes in practical, everyday usage.
So now there is GC and @nogc, lifetimes but not quite, scoped pointers, scoped references,... while Phobos and ecosystem aren't in a state to fully work across all those variations.