It is intended that Safe Rust be the main competitor to C. You are not meant to write your whole program in unsafe Rust using raw pointers - that would indicate a significant failure of Rust’s expressive power.

Its true that many Rust programs involve some element of unsafe Rust, but that unsafety is meant to be contained and abstracted, not pervasive throughout the program. That’s a significant difference from how C’s unsafety works.

Even if you somehow manage to ignore the very obvious theoretical argument why it works, the amount of quantitative evidence at this point is staggering: Rust, including unsafe warts and all, substantially improve the ability of any competent team to deliver working software. By a huge margin.

This is the programming equivalent of vaccine denialism.