The situation is not that bad. The rules of unsafe code were pretty badly defined back then, but they are in process of becoming a lot clearer, and like the grandparent argues, with a well-defined aliasing model like Tree Borrows, they are easier to understand than C's.
If you look into the code you linked, the problem was about accessing undefined bytes though an aliased, differently-typed pointer – something you would have hard time doing in C to begin with. MaybeUninit was a new thing back then. I think that nowadays, a senior Rust developer would clear the hurdles better.
If you look into the code you linked, the problem was about accessing undefined bytes though an aliased, differently-typed pointer – something you would have hard time doing in C to begin with. MaybeUninit was a new thing back then. I think that nowadays, a senior Rust developer would clear the hurdles better.