Certainly you pay a price for lifetimes but you buy compile time race condition detection via the borrow checker's aliasing-xor-mutability enforcement. So all that is happening is the complexity of concurrency is being made explicit and therefore easier to reason about. Many applications can be architected in a way that wouldn't ever trigger a race, so for people working on that it isn't something they would need to reason about and they can call it unneeded complexity. This is the simpler vs. simplistic distinction also made in the article. If you can be simplistic, garbage collection is less cognitively demanding, but if you are designing race free algorithms with shared memory then rust will be. I do believe more developers and applications live in the former.

The better example actually comes from the article: returning a struct and an iterator over that struct isn't possible in rust. Heck, initializing a struct to return an iterator might lead to issues. Most people will encounter this before needing a linked list and the lesson it teaches will help out with the linked list.