[gary17the]

No, not really. Firstly, there is no significant "friction" to using Rust smart pointers and internal mutability primitives, as those constructs have been added to Rust for a reason: to solve certain borrow checker edge cases (e.g., multiply interconnected data structures), so they are treated by the Rust ecosystem as first-class citizens. Secondly, those constructs make a pretty good educational tool. By the time people get to know Rust well enough to use those constructs, they will inevitably realize that mastering the Rust borrow checker is just one book chapter away to go through out of passion or boredom.

[wredue]

I find quite a lot of friction in being demanded to understand all of the methods, what they do, when you’d use them, why you’d choose one over another that does a slightly different thing, but maybe still fits.

The method documentation alone in reference counting is more pages than some entire programming languages. That’s beside the necessary knowledge for using it.

[gary17the]

I don't think it's necessary to understand every single `Rc<T>` method[1] to use Rust smart pointers to learn Rust. Perhaps try a different learning resource such as "Rust By Example"[2], instead?

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/rc/struct.Rc.html

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/std/rc.html