> Has there been progress in improving that aspect during the LLM phase of the rewrite?

I'd say so! We aim to have our replacements to be `forbid(unsafe)` - no raw pointers - outside of `ffi.rs`. Of course it's tricky because we need to interoperate with existing C code, but we've been trying to come up with abstractions that make this a bit more ergonomic (https://github.com/google/safer_cffi).