Are you with a straight face saying that occasionally having a safety bug in limited unsafe areas of Rust is functionally the same as having written the entire program in an unsafe language like C?

One, the dollar cost is not the same. The baseline floor of quality will be higher for a Rust program vs. a C program given equal development effort.

Second, the total possible footprint of entire classes of bugs is zero thanks to design features of Rust (the borrowck, sum types, data race prevention), except in a specifically delineated areas which often total zero in the vast majority of Rust programs.