What you are missing, of course, is the Rc<Refcell<T>> that you have to stick everywhere to make a nontrivial Rust program. It’s like monads in Haskell, parentheses in lisp, verbosity in Java, or warnings in C - they’re the magic words you have to incant correctly to make things work in their weird paradigms.

The meme refers to the old adage “C lets you shoot yourself on the foot. C++ lets you shoot both feet and gives you a shotgun to do it” - referring to the how C allows you to perform memory-unsafe operations (causing corruption, or worse, security vulnerabilities), and C++'s complexity, potentially obscuring such unsafetyness.

Rust’s memory safety tries to save you from doing (un)intentional bad stuff, by giving you compile-time errors. It’s also the bane of everyone so used to C/++'s ability to just pass around and modify whatever memory they want.