Yeah but that doesn't work for any kind of performant code which is the reason people who write those data structures use unsafe. This is one very annoying thing about Rust community. The language sucks for coding self-referencing data structures with unpredictable free patterns. This is a fact and the reason number of people on this very forum posted long articles about moving away from Rust for those purposes.
Your "actually you can" post is just misleading and will result in more people who will get burnt but the design of the language.
No, you really can. You can use GC crates and the performance will be like Java, or you can use Rc and the performance will be like Swift. The only reason Rust people use unsafe for data structures (and they do not always do) is that for them, Java/Swift-level performance is just not enough.