I've seen similar sentiments echoed before, elsewhere. The point it's making is the same one that's argued whenever people say you should learn LISP because it'll make you a better programmer.
There's no such thing as a perfectly intuitive programming language because algorithmic thinking isn't something that comes to us intuitively. That's why the first language is always the hardest.
It's helpful and mind-expanding to learn new paradigms and force yourself out of old cognitive ruts. Thus, from an "improving your ability to solve problems and function as a programmer" perspective, what makes Rust difficult is valuable because it's forcing you to learn to think about problems in new ways.
That's the distinction between necessary complexity and complexity due to ill-considered design. (Similar to how, in video games, there's a difference between genuine difficulty and difficulty caused by something like a crappy control scheme.)