Then I think RefCell
is exactly what you want to defer the mutable borrow to runtime instead of compile time: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=3170c01849dc577a501ecb11dd44c5ba (source for this method on StackOverflow).
Maybe there could be syntactic sugar to use captures implicitely as RefCell
s inside a closure. But I would not be a fan of implicitely allowing multiple mutable borrows without any clue for that in the code.
Do you have any sources about this "unfitness" of Rust for gamedev? From my experience many people have problems with the borrow checker due to habits they obtained coding in other languages. Due to the strict enforcement of ownership rules some things can't be done exactly like in e.g. C++, but the language offers the tools to design and implement the software in a way to work with (not around!) the borrow checker (an example would be the discussion in another comment thread).
So I'd be interested what special behavior occurs in gamedev that makes coding in Rust more difficult than for other software.
Also, I really like that you're considering users with lower spec machines for your game. However, have you run a profiler over your software to see where there is optimization potential? In cases like this, I often use the (maybe over-used) quote from Donald Knuth:
Many people think that with this quote, no optimization whatsoever should be considered. However, humans are often bad predictors on where the real bottlenecks are.
So yes, have some things in mind like e.g. algorithm performance for the expected input sizes. But in many cases, "optimization" done doesn't impact the runtime at all but makes the code much more difficult to understand and often more "unsafe" due to potentially increasing UB or other issues.
For this, a profiler helps to detect where your "critical 3%" are. And when you know them, then you can start optimization work to get big improvements. This also helps to direct your most likely limited effort to spend to the important parts of your game.