It is no accident that the language designers of D, Chapel, Swift, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, looked at Rust lifetimes and current state of borrow checker and decided, while a good idea, they would rather keep automatic memory management productivity with just enough lifetimes, than the Rust approach.
Also we should take into consideration that while these concepts are somehow hard to use in Rust versus other languages, in Cyclone they are even more complex, and Rust is actually a more ergonomic version already, despite its complexity.
I dream of the day someone takes up the effort and develops a garbage collecting front-end for Rust. The language in itself is really nice, it's functional and has nice algebraic sum types. I also like the syntax a lot. One could perhaps even re-use crates, since they've been proven correct by the rust compiler already.
But then why not use Scala, OCaml, Haskell, etc? Rust is only interesting and novel that it can target the very niche area where GCs are not generally allowed.
Try out Kotlin, or just spend more time with rust to get comfortable with memory management. Once you get used to it, for so many cases, the difference kinda boils down to wrapping certain code in a pair of curly braces to ensure things get dropped.
I use manual lifetimes very infrequently. I honestly used to use them more when trying to represent referenced types in structs, but usually find myself reaching for Arc<Mutex> now.
Also we should take into consideration that while these concepts are somehow hard to use in Rust versus other languages, in Cyclone they are even more complex, and Rust is actually a more ergonomic version already, despite its complexity.