Bearing in mind that "there should be no room for a language above assembly and below Rust" (i.e. something like what C or C++ is to Python, Java, C#, etc.) was an intentional design decision for Rust which resulted in `unsafe`.
It seems very common for people to misunderstand that having strict accounting for unsafe is part of why Rust does what it does so well rather than just disallowing unsafe outright. I think it's easily confused because being able to choose "how much unsafe do I want to allow, and where do I want to allow it" allows the choice "I don't want any in my own code" to be easily enforced, and that's by far the most common amount needed, but it's certainly not the only useful one. Being able to handle the edge cases without having to give up the checks entirely is a huge improvement over most alternatives.
That's not a property of the language, it's just an optimization they made in line with the "Release a minimum viable product, then improve it" strategy they inherited from Mozilla.
Just look at how long it took LLVM to catch up to GCC. Writing a competitive optimizer pipeline is hard work.
"No room for a language above assembly and below Rust" is a design goal for what it's reasonable to build with it.
If anything, using LLVM for the default backend is completely on-brand with how much priority Rust puts on being suitable for partially or incrementally rewriting C codebases.
