I've been dabbling in Rust on and off since 2014, and this has always been my feeling. I thought my background in C++ would make things reasonably easy, and while I have little fondness for C++, it's still easier to get things done than with Rust, which is not at all what I expected given my 4 years with the language.
There's a lot to like about Rust, but it falls far short of the "easy-as-Go" promises made by many of its proponents.
Really? I was hearing that 2 or 3 times a week before Tokio was popularized. "Rust is as easy as Go for writing server apps!" "You don't need goroutines or async for high performance servers; Linux threads work fine!". When people started hearing about Tokio, many people seemed sure it would be easier. None of this is meant to bash these people; I think their goals and vision is laudable and I hope they get there; I just think their optimism blinded them a bit.
My impression is that people use Rust for correctness, security, and speed over ease of use. Although I do think once you get over the initial learning curve (which is admittedly large) it mostly makes sense.
There's a lot to like about Rust, but it falls far short of the "easy-as-Go" promises made by many of its proponents.