People make it sound like its some extreme time consuming task to learn rust. Rust actually gives helpful compiler errors tho and there's a lot of resources online.

I was able to start making some basic things in rust (like an ascii-rendered brute force n-body simulation) with the help of a few google searches after just like 2 days of messing around in my free time. I'm sure reading kernel stuff requires much more advanced knowledge than what I have but it's really not a large barrier.