I take it you haven’t seen Brainfuck yet? Rust is pretty straightforward and I was able to submit PRs fixing several bugs within an hour. I can’t write new code, but grasping what is going on is pretty easy. For a language to be “challenging” I’d say that it shouldn’t be easy to tell what is going on without knowing a bunch of language specific-ish operators (aka, Haskell).
Rust is actually quite easy to use, that's literally one of its selling points. It's supposed to allow you to use nicer syntax than C AND also gives you guardrails to prevent you from introducing memory unsafety.