[Rusky]

Point 2 is only a limitation of the current standard library, not of the language-level model. It has even been relaxed recently, so you can go from a &Cell<[T]> to a &[Cell<T>]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/61620

The same could be done for struct fields if the type system knew about it, and the whole thing could just use normal syntax.

Sharing between threads still needs &T or &mut T (or an owned value), but that's not usually involved in the painful cases.