[pasabagi]

On the other hand, I think the most important thing in making developers replaceable is the degree to which the codebase explicitly contains all the information relevant to it.

Lifetimes are an additional, important piece of information that would have previously been something a programmer would have to have an intuition for, or that would need to be put in documentation.

Now, that work is delegated to the compiler, and so, your individual developer is somewhat more fungible.

I don't know if rust is specifically the future in this regard, but I think if I was a machivellian manager, I'd be interested in replacing instances of human intuition and group knowledge with tooling, as much as possible. The burrow checker is one such tool - even if automatic garbage collection is probably a more straightforward one.