Absolutely. The funny thing is that this story was repeating even in XXI century because TI-BASIC gives you enough of the rope to hang yourself.
Only when smartphones have become ubiquitous and people stopped trying to program in TI-BASIC the problem, finally, went away.
You can find an example (and discussion) here. Note how topicstarter's friend actually does understand “the concept of mutabiity in Rust”. S/he just reacts like other programmers reacted to structured programming: Us converts waved this interesting bit of news under the noses of the unreconstructed assembly-language programmers who kept trotting forth twisty bits of logic and saying, 'I betcha can't structure this.' Neither the proof by Böhm and Jacopini nor our repeated successes at writing structured code brought them around one day sooner than they were ready to convince themselves.
Thus I'm pretty sure languages with lifetimes, inspired by Rust is the future… only it would arrive in the usual way: An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.