[Rusky]

RAII is completely orthogonal to lifetimes, for one thing. You can have either without the other.

But, I am familiar with the kind of thing you're complaining about here, and frankly the mere existence of RAII is not its cause. Working with a large dataset, managing allocation/layout/traversal in a holistic way, you just... don't write destructors for every tiny piece. It works fine, I do it all the time (in both Rust and C++).