“Rust lifetimes can be chore, so use a C-like language that requires you to manage them in your head”

Weird that they don’t consider other options, in particular languages with reference counting or garbage collection. Those will not solve all ownership issues, but for immutable objects, they typically do. For short-running CLI tools, garbage collecting languages may even be faster than ones with manual memory management because they may be able to postpone all memory freeing until the program exits.