It's more than that. Even after you learn it, you will struggle a lot with productivity, especially fast iteration and incremental changes and fixes, as Rust forces you to redesign and refactor your code.

How is that different than learning any other language?

I think Rust’s reputation for being hard to learn is overblown. Yes it is probably a little more esoteric than what you’re familiar with but any decent dev should be able to pick it up

The alternative is jousting with attackers. In production. When you're not aware of it. You're not even on the field, let alone mounted on your horse and wearing armour.