Comment by samatman

This is the opposite of my experience with other strongly typed languages. They're easier to refactor, because when you change the types, say you delete a field, everywhere that field was used is a compile error. Clean them up and on your way.

The borrow checker is an entirely different beast. People forget that safe Rust allows a subset of programs. Finding the subset which does what you want can range from easy, to hair-pullingly gnarly, to provably impossible.