Erm what? The article contradicts this. I'd push back on "without jumping through hoops". The article itself demonstrates 6 layers of abstraction (Vec<T> -> RawVec<T> -> RawVecInner -> Unique<u8> -> NonNull<u8> -> *const u8) built on unsafe primitives. The standard library does the hoop-jumping for you, which is valuable, but the hoops exist, they're just relocated.

I bet Vec's implementation is full of unsafe blocks and careful invariant management. Users face different hoops: lifetime wrangling, fighting the borrow checker on valid patterns, Pin semantics, etc. Rust trades runtime overhead for upfront costs: compile-time complexity and developer time wrestling with the borrow checker which is often the right trade, but it's not hoop-free.

The "close to hardware" claim needs qualification too. You're close to hardware through abstractions that hide significant complexity. Ada/SPARK gives formal correctness guarantees but requires proof effort and runtime checks (unless you use SPARK which is a subset of Ada). C gives you actual hardware access but manual memory management. Each has trade-offs - Rust's aren't magically absent.