In what ways do you feel Rust is too clunky and how do you think it could be improved? Not looking to argue or even disagree necessarily; I’m just curious where that perspective comes from.

I mean, technically there’s nothing preventing that, but in practice it’s a fairly uncommon mistake to make and it’s immediately obvious that there’s an issue the first time that path is taken. If something like that makes it to production, it clearly points to an issue with test coverage rather than code paradigm.