Comment by bakugo

The video I linked to is long but goes through all of this.

Pretty much nobody writing games in C++ uses raw pointers in entities to hold references to other related entities, because entities can be destroyed at any time and there's no simple way for a referring entity to know when a referenced entity is destroyed.

Using some sort of entity ID or entity handle is very common in C++, the problem is that when implementing this sort of system in Rust, developers often end up having to effectively "work around" the borrow checker, and they end up not really gaining anything in terms of correctness over C++, ultimately defeating the purpose of using Rust in the first place, at least for that particular system.