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.

Reference counting and locks often is the easy path in Rust. It may not feel like it because of the syntax overhead, but I firmly believe it should be one of the first solutions on the list, not a last resort. People get way too fixed on trying to prove to the borrow checker that something or another is OK, because they feel like they need to make things fast, but it's rare that the overhead is actually relevant.

I strongly disagree that smart pointers are "off the paved road". I don't even care to make specific arguments against that notion, it's just a terrible take.

It's telling people to avoid the famously hard meme-road.

Mutexes and reference counting work fine, and are sometimes dramatically simpler than getting absolutely-minimal locks like people seem to always want to do with Rust.