Author here. Yeah, I don't like the borrowchecker. But the motivation for me writing the article is the almost religious zeal with which many Rustaceans refuse to even acknowledge that the borrowchecker has a cost in terms of ergonomics, and that this translates to e.g. iteration speed.
You encounter borrowchecker issues? Well, you're just a beginner or not skilled enough. Rust makes you jump through hoops? No it doesn't, it just makes you pay upfront what you otherwise would have. It slows development? No, studies show it doesn't, you must be imagining it.
This is extremely annoying to be on the receiving end of. Even though it comes from a good place (mostly just excitement), it can feel like gaslighting.
You should look up the term "zero cost abstractions".
It's the organizing principle of the second generation of Rust's leadership[1]. Formally, it means "zero runtime cost"[2], but the now-former maintainers operated as though it meant Rust could get rid of all cost. The belief was that they can have a language that's faster than C, safer than Ada, more ergonomic than Java, more memory safe than Go, by either making the compiler do more work, or working more on the compiler. In practice, I think this belief caused massive complexity in the compiler, trade-off dishonesty in the community, and bad evangelism in domains unsuited for memory safety (e.g. games programming)
[1] Graydon, the original author of Rust, was against this idea.
[2] The term originates from C++ as "zero overhead" which was smaller in scope, and not a governing principle of the C++ language.
You encounter borrowchecker issues? Well, you're just a beginner or not skilled enough. Rust makes you jump through hoops? No it doesn't, it just makes you pay upfront what you otherwise would have. It slows development? No, studies show it doesn't, you must be imagining it.
This is extremely annoying to be on the receiving end of. Even though it comes from a good place (mostly just excitement), it can feel like gaslighting.