That's my whole point. Without the borrow checker it would have been a nice language, but I believe it would not have gotten popular, because being nice isnt enough to be popular in the current programming language landscape.
As a Rust fan, I 100% agree. I already know plenty of nice, "safe", "efficient" languages. I know only one language with a borrow checker, and that feature has honestly driven me to use it in excess.
Most of my smaller projects don't benefit so much from the statically proven compile time guarantees that e.g. Rust with it's borrow checker provide. They're simple enough to more-or-less exhaustively test. They also tend to have simple enough data models and/or lax enough latency requirements that garbage collectors aren't a drawback. C#? Kotlin? Java? Javascript? ??? Doesn't matter. I'm writing them in Rust now, and I'm comfortable enough with the borrow checker that I don't feel it slows me down, but I wouldn't have learned Rust in the first place without a borrow checker to draw me in, and I respect when people choose to pass on the whole circus for similar projects.
The larger projects... for me they tend to be C++, and haven't been rewritten in Rust, so I'm tormented with a stream of bugs, a large portion of which would've been prevented - or at least made shallow - by Rust's borrow checker. Every single one of them taunts me with how theoretically preventable they are.
You can use a garbage collector in Rust to circumvent borrow checker. You can use simple reference counting (Rc, Arc), or trace and sweep, arenas, or generation based garbage collectors. Even a simple .clone() can help a lot in many cases.
Borrow checker is my friend, it helps me write better code, but it doesn't stops me when I don't care about code quality and just want a task to be done.
