Where did I say Rust's borrow checker predates lifetimes?

I'm saying you have to be as meticulous as a borrow checker. Not as strict, of course, but you have to analyze each pointer, how and when it's used, and then cross-reference with the documented lifetime.

Just like thread safety existed before Rust made it explicit. Now you don't need to investigate if data is thread safe if it's `Send + Sync`.

This is a job humans suck at and compilers excel at. With some caveats. There will be edge cases that will need to be manually proven.