Your experience matches an observation I have made, that when C++ developers approach Rust for the first time they often "fight the borrow checker" when they use C++ idioms in Rust. Then they start to learn Rust idioms, and bring them back to C++, which causes them to write more robust code despite not having and borrow checking at all.
For the most part true, but there exists patterns I can do safely and easily in c++ which I cannot in rust. Structured concurrency being one of the major ones. If a child object takes a reference to the parent, I shouldn't need to do it by way of an Arc, but because of the fact that leaking memory is safe, this isn't possible to do in rust without using the unsafe keyword. So I end up with more refcounting that I want. (This is often in the context of async). I don't bring this pattern back to c++ with me.
