There's more nuance to "don’t use lifetimes". Novices typically don't understand the relationship between owning and borrowing, and try to use temporary references where they semantically don't belong (in Rust ownership can't be as ambiguous as in GC languages, and references can't be made out of thin air — they borrow from somewhere that must already be owned/stored somewhere).

So often the advice is not "don't use lifetimes, because the borrow checker can't handle them", but rather "don't use lifetimes where an owned value is required" or "don't use lifetimes until you understand how ownership works".