Lack of a non-hacky no-panic guarantee is a pain. That would be like a no-segfault guarantee in C.
But Rust's situation is still safer, because Rust can typically prevent more errors from ever becoming a run-time issue, e.g. you may not even need to use array indexing at all if you use iterators. You have a guarantee that references are never NULL, so you don't risk nullptr crash, etc.
Rust panics are safer, because they reliably happen instead of an actually unsafe operation.
Mitigations in C are usually best-effort and you may be lucky/unlucky to silently corrupt memory.
Panics are a problem for uptime, but not for safety (in the sense they're not exploitable for more than DoS).
In the long term crashing loud and clear may be better for reliability. You shake out all the bugs instead of having latent issues that corrupt your data.
But Rust's situation is still safer, because Rust can typically prevent more errors from ever becoming a run-time issue, e.g. you may not even need to use array indexing at all if you use iterators. You have a guarantee that references are never NULL, so you don't risk nullptr crash, etc.
Rust panics are safer, because they reliably happen instead of an actually unsafe operation. Mitigations in C are usually best-effort and you may be lucky/unlucky to silently corrupt memory.
Panics are a problem for uptime, but not for safety (in the sense they're not exploitable for more than DoS).
In the long term crashing loud and clear may be better for reliability. You shake out all the bugs instead of having latent issues that corrupt your data.