People bring this up a lot. What I see here is that thousands of potentially (not actually, just potentially) safety risks have been neatly tagged in the code.

If you took a program written in Zig, Go, C++, or C, you would have no idea which parts of the code were potentially unsafe. In those languages, the entire program is one big unsafe{} block.

Rust isolates unsafe code. Having them explicitly tagged means they're isolated and can be eradicated over time, if need be. Though in many cases, unsafe blocks are quite safe.