No they really don't. 95% of rust is safe rust[1].

Also unsafe rust doesn't remove bounds checks. arr[idx] is bounds checked in every context.

You can opt out of array bounds checking by writing unsafe { arr.get_unchecked(idx) } . But thats incredibly rare in practice.

[1] https://cs.stanford.edu/~aozdemir/blog/unsafe-rust-syntax/

"unsafe Rust" is not a binary; you don't opt into it for every single line of code. Given that the entire premise behind the idea that using C instead of Rust is fine is that people should be able to pay close attention and not make mistakes like this, having the number of places you need to look be a tiny fraction of the overall code that's explicitly marked as unsafe is a massive difference from C where literally every line of the code could be hiding stuff like this.

> except nearly everyone uses unsafe rust

Really? Why? I've not used Rust outside of some fairly small efforts, but I've never found a reason to reach for unsafe. So why is "nearly everyone" else using it?