They're actually incredibly easy to learn if your software paradigm is the request-response flow.
The borrow checker might kill your productivity if you're writing large, connected, multi-threaded data structures, but that simply isn't the nature of 90% of services.
If you want to keep around global state (db connectors, in-memory caches, etc.) Arc<Mutex<T>> is a simple recipe that works for most shared objects. It's dead simple.
You can think of Rust with Axum/Actix as a drop-in replacement for Go or Python/Flask. With the added benefits of (1) no GC / bare metal performance, (2) much lower defect rate as a consequence of the language ergonomics, (3) run it and forget it - no GC tuning, very simple scaling.
Rust has effectively made writing with the performance of C++ feel like writing Ruby, but with unparalleled low defect rates and safety on account of the type system.
This is a little overblown.. speaking VERY HAND-WAVILY, sea_orm < active record by a factor of about 10x more mental overhead but is at least that much more performant...
but yea, vibe-coding rust micro services is pretty amazing lately, almost no interactions with borrow checker, and I'm even using cucumber specs...
I currently wouldn't recommend any Rust ORM, Diesel included. They're just not quite ready for prime time.
If you're not one to shy away from raw SQL, then SQLx is rock-solid. I actually prefer it over ORMs in general. It's type-checked at runtime or compile time against your schema, no matter how complex the query gets. It manages to do this with an incredibly simple design.
It's like an even nicer version of Java's popular jOOQ framework, which I always felt was incredibly ugly.
SQLx might be my very favorite SQL library of any language.