It's intentionally limiting. If you need an owner, create one (call it a graph struct that holds all you nodes for example). Make lifetime management an explicit and separate concern and unit test it independently. If this is too slow for your performance needs use a library that probably uses unsafe Rust to optimize the parts that matter and that offers safe abstractions for you to interact with. If there's none, roll your own. Be happy that not everybody is slinging dangling pointers all over the place in code where it's really unnecessary.
Was about to write this exactly. Keep the lifecycle management in a dedicated component. Unsafe seems vastly overkill for dealing with this use case.
I'm even having a hard time seeing how this could be slower than any other alternative. Yes, in the places where creating / deleting is necessary, the "root" structure will have to be passed around, but in the worst case that has the cost of adding one argument to a function (which has the nice side effect of making the lifecycle _visible_).
