I've been going through this book, not once did I have to think about memory management (beyond adding a few &), it's simply not needed at this high level and crates manage most of the low level details for you. I especially haven't had to think about Arc, Rc, etc either.
Unfortunately I haven't had the same experience as you. Even for a simple program I've had to think about passing by value/reference, lifetime annotations, static lifetimes, etc.
That's not to say I don't like Rust; I hope it takes over the world that C/C++ have a grip on.
