> To him, the entire code base might as well be unsafe.

Not at all. I would very much like the code to be safe, it's just that I reach for a low level language to get the thing that low-level languages are designed to offer me, which is control, and no language offers control and safety at the same time. So when the interesting parts of the code could be written in safe Rust, I have to give up control, and in that case I'd rather use a more convenient language that doesn't give me full control. And when the interesting parts of the code need full control, Rust doesn't give me safety anyway, and I still pay for its complexity. As to encapsulating unsafe, that doesn't help at all if the most tricky parts of the code are inside. What happens there is that Rust makes the hard parts harder and the easy parts easier, and for me that's a net negative.