What tools or workflows should beginners adopt early to make Rust development smoother (formatting, linting, testing)?

You should:

• Format your code with cargo fmt (or have your IDE do it).
• Regularly run cargo clippy - Clippy will do a great job of teaching you idiomatic Rust.
• Get used to cargo test - and use an IDE that integrates it.

If you're coming from C++, you should appreciate Cargo's ability to do everything in one tool!

With that said: don't worry about being perfect up-front. Make programs, enjoy Rust. Nobody gets all of it the first time - and that's entirely normal.

My daily driver is Rust Rover.