Agree with this take. I think about Rust's memory safety about as much as I think about other language's garbage collectors. Which is to say occasionally, but certainly not every day. It's the underlying design that makes the language ergonomic, but not a daily consideration for average users.

What I appreciate day-to-day about Rust is that it encourages (coerces you at compile time) to get things right. If you did not consider all possible code paths, you will hear about it immediately - not in a bug report 6 months from now. Where things are not right, they're obviously not so (ie unwrap). This gives me confidence that the rust code I ship will run in prod without failing due to some unforeseen error. Every error condition, aside from catastrophic hardware failure, has been accounted for in the AST of the program. That's not "proven correct" but it's close enough for production work.