That's one pleasant effect (although a bit orthogonal to what I was referring to), because my default behavior in Rust is to pass ownership which results in that memory being dropped as soon as it's no longer needed.

I guess what I'm referring to is that I think reasoning about the borrow checker is easier when references are opt-in instead of being the default. That behavior is re-enforced by the fact that the language's default is ownership. So I only end up needing to think hard about the lifetime of a variable when I've decided to (or been explicitly forced to) use references. I think it's a good way to reduce the cognitive burden of an already unfamiliar mechanism.

EDIT: This also gets at one of my favorite parts of Rust: so many choices have been made in designing the language and standard library that make it so easy to do things "the right way" (either through those things being the default, or making it hard to do stupid things, etc.).