[Lorkki]

Both type inference and borrow checking have also received a whole bunch of small improvements over the past couple years. Subtle enough that you probably wouldn't notice them except in that the language just takes less effort to use.

If you use Rust 2018 now, non-lexical lifetimes are a bigger recent improvement: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/edition-guide/rust-2018/ow...

[TheCoelacanth]

Also error messages have had a lot of effort put into them, so an error that would have been confusing a few years ago, now may no longer be confusing.

[steveklabnik]

This is true, but it also happened a lot even before NLL. That said, I do think it's an additional factor today, you're right.