It would be if I ran into it regularly -- but after using the language for a variety of professional and personal projects for a couple of years, this is the only time I’ve actually needed to manually-specify lifetimes since the compiler normally figures it out for me :)
I know people say that about everything but Rust generics are very readable and do make sense after you understand what problem are they solving.
They do look intimidating to start with, admittedly, and I'll concede that's a negative point for Rust. But it does get better if you practice for a bit.
Not sure that's the case btw. I have noticed it with some libraries but I've used and crated a fair amount of generics without having to annotate stuff with lifetimes.
Lifetimes are necessary when you want to explicitly say "variable X will live just as long as variable Y", or sometimes it's more complex (i.e. you have to specify 2 or more separate lifetimes and then return something that pertains to only one of them) but it's still fairly predictable if you keep it all in your head while coding.
Don't get me wrong I still hate it but it's not as terrible as many people make it out to be. It's hard to get into but also very logical and graspable.