Rust's compiler is pretty much the reason the language gets so much praise. The borrow checking of course is the major reason, but it's great at hints too.

This is pretty cool. But my question is if the compiler knows it’s basically the same thing visually, why doesn’t it treat it the same way as far as syntax and just make them functionally equivalent;

While the language can be hard to get used to, the error messages are mostly great.
But sometimes you can send it on a goose chase with impossible type inference.