I agree with you as long as you don't know C++ first. I actually teach C++ and Rust to students who only know Java, and they have a much easier time picking up Rust. It's the people who approach Rust with C++ idioms who have the wort time with it. It comes down to the tooling, especially Cargo being the one-stop-shop for everything Rust. Another poster here laments that Cargo is too overloaded with disjoint functionality, but that's actually a benefit for a lot of learners.

I think tooling is big and people underestimate the lingering cognitive overhead of simply building C++ with arcane CMake files, but honestly it's more that much of Rust is informed by problems in C++ that they didn't have to inherit and don't have to maintain forever.

Like for example, how many ways are there to initialize a variable in C++? Which are you supposed to use?

C++ is the hardest, most difficult programming language to write correct (according to spec, not in the ‘it compiles’ sense) programs in ever created that isn’t a toy or specifically designed to be hard like malbolge. It takes a decade of writing it daily to realize that you know nothing, precisely because the compiler does not reject so many invalid programs.