If a friend told me they liked Rust but didn't like the borrow checker, I'd probably point them to Gleam and Moonbit, which both seem awesome in their own niches.
Both have rust-like flavor and neither has a borrow checker.
Both have rust-like flavor and neither has a borrow checker.
(It also needs some kind of reflection-like thing, either compile-time or runtime, so that there can be an equivalent of Rust's Serde, but at least they admit that that needs doing.)