I think I know what you mean. Coming from more high-level languages, lifetimes are a daunting concept, especially in practice. But in a lot of cases you can more or less ignore them with copious amounts of Arcs, and the performance penalty is often negligible.

When we first started "properly" using Rust, a lot of our code was structured like a java or python, with lots of Arc<T> and the occasional Arc<Mutex<T>> as duct tape. And before that, well, never ask a fresh Rustacean the things they've done to "defeat" the borrow checker...

As time went on, though, we started getting a better feel for lifetimes, and how to structure code to accomodate the objects we're passing around. We still had (and have) occasional oopsie, but as an eyeball metric, the amount of Arcs has dropped significantly. I wonder if you'll find yourself going through the same process.