Well, ease is one incentive, yes :)

Another is the complexity of the language when it comes to low-level programming. E.g. bytemuck I've mentioned before solves a problem that is hard to even explain to a C developer.

I think a big difference is that the less unsafe you want in your own code, the more you rely on crates to provide a safe abstraction for unsafe code in a centralized place where soundness holes are likely to be found.

Of course it was always understood that you could have bugs in C libraries and some of them may include memory unsafety, but the culture is very different when there's no explicit way to demarcate the parts of the code most deserving of scrutiny.