You're overthinking it. Rust's syntax is not that complicated, even if it looks a bit scary before you read the book. For C programmers the real hard part is in semantics of references, which C programmers mistake for general-purpose pointers, and gloss over ownership.
Rust has an intentional well thought-out approach to what it makes explicit[1], which is useful in a language that is focused on control, correctness, and performance. It's not trying to make source code beautiful, it's trying to balance usability of the language with avoidance of surprises caused by implicit compiler magic.
[1]: https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/2017-12-27-things-explicit...