I think people are still working out the best way to do GUIs and game engines in Rust, but I wouldn't say that's because it's impossible. It's just quite new.

It took decades to get a C++ GUI framework that was really nice (Qt) and even then it used MOC so wasn't pure C++.

Intrusive lists are quite niche and not a big deal.

I think people are working on improving the ergonomics for Rc<Refcell< etc.

So there are definitely some downsides, but also so many upsides. You could easily say C++ can't replace Rust in many areas because of X, Y, Z.