In most languages looking at the start would be a good idea because most tail errors are really consequences of the ones at head.
This is true just as much in Rust. When there are lots of errors, I have found it to be much more frequently productive to start processing from the first error rather than from the end.
I found one reason to use head first (with an alias to a head command): the head appears very fast while I must frequently wait several seconds for the end.
So I just made myself this:
alias cck="cargo watch -s 'cargo check --color always 2>&1 | head -n 50'"
iTerm2 on macOS has a great feature to jump to "previous mark/annotation" (keyboard shortcut: command-shift-up), and it sets a mark at each command prompt. It's super useful to jump to the start of the output at the previous command! More docs here