It's not "automatic" reference counting, it's "atomic" reference counting. And it's not automatic, it's entirely manual and implemented with traits as a fat pointer. Reference counting types in Rust are just defaults that give certain guarantees.

This feels like people arguing that atheism is a kind of religion. Borrow checking and a library of safe default primitives make it so you don't really have to think about memory management; except to the extent that you generally stick to those primitives, and that you have to install the borrow checker into your own head to write Rust comfortably (although the compiler will help.)

Rust doesn't have any garbage collection, but it can just assume how you would want to deal with memory by forcing you to be very specific about when values should be created or destroyed.