You can choose to use either refcounting or unique ownership for your types. For most use cases, refcounted (+ copy-on-write) is the best choice and is the default, but the truetype interpreter made extensive use of non-refcounted types to achieve this performance.

You can pick and chose, and memory ownership is getting better in latest versions.

Being more ergonomic is relevant enough for increasing language adoption, that possible improvements are now on Rust roadmap.

They have either recently added or talked about a borrow style system in the language as a way to avoid more copies and speed things up/lower memory usage/help with asynchronous programming.