Yes, Rust is quite different from typical languages thanks to ownership and borrowing. It often takes people several attempts to learn it before their perspective shifts and it finally clicks for them. But this perception of Rust has less to do with Rust being "hard" than it has to do with Rust being "different". To be sure, Rust has hard parts even after you've internalized the differences, but IMO by that point it's not substantially different from mastering the hard parts of other languages (especially other systems languages, none of whom can get away with entirely sweeping the details of the machine under the rug).