[pdpi]

Your comment prompted me to look at Rust's release history. In the whole of the history, I can spot maybe a handful of changes that made the language non-trivially harder for a beginner. Everything else either makes the language easier (by making things more predictable), or is a net neutral. Most of the language-level changes are about enabling current features to work in more scenarios, such that coming across new features tends to feel more like "oh I hadn't realised I could do this" than "what does syntax thing mean?"