> ETA: To me it feels a bit like the icky type coercion magic some languages have that lets you write code that kind of works even though you don't understand what you're doing. I don't know Rust though, so this may be totally different.
It is quite different.
In Rust already it is possible to proxy "pointer to a thing" as "the thing itself" in a lot of different places, making it a lot more pleasant to work with. This is a continuation of that trend.
It's pretty easy to know if most things are a pointer or not, but more importantly if it's not immediately obvious it rarely matters (i.e. you're not the one creating or consuming it; you're just sharing borrows to it). At which point sharing pointer-to-value vs pointer-to-pointer isn't very different, and Rust implicitly deals with that.
It is quite different.
In Rust already it is possible to proxy "pointer to a thing" as "the thing itself" in a lot of different places, making it a lot more pleasant to work with. This is a continuation of that trend.
It's pretty easy to know if most things are a pointer or not, but more importantly if it's not immediately obvious it rarely matters (i.e. you're not the one creating or consuming it; you're just sharing borrows to it). At which point sharing pointer-to-value vs pointer-to-pointer isn't very different, and Rust implicitly deals with that.