EDIT: Hacker News has limited my ability to respond. Please keep in mind that Rust has a large number of active fans, who may have biases for whatever reasons.

> Still, having smaller sections of unsafe is a boon because you isolate these locations of elevated power, meaning they are auditable and obvious.

The Rustonomicon makes it very clear that it is generally insufficient to only verify correctness of Rust-unsafe blocks. If the absence of UB in a Rust-unsafe block depends on Rust-not-unsafe code in the surrounding module, potentially the whole module has to be verified for correctness. And that assumes that the module has correct encapsulation, otherwise even more may have to be verified. And a single buggy change to Rust-not-unsafe code can cause UB, if a Rust-unsafe block somewhere depends on that code to be correct.