> Rust's safety checks do in fact block some safe and zero-overhead abstractions familiar to people working in C and C++

The issue of course is that while these abstractions are zero-overhead and can sometimes be used safely, they aren't compositional in general. That is, they impose requirements on outside code which aren't easily captured by Rust's type system. This is exactly what the 'unsafe' facility in Rust was made for. Note also that more recently-developed abstractions of the "Qcell" or "GhostCell" type can in fact implement linked lists safely, and once these are better understood a variety of them will likely be included in the Rust standard library.