Wrong, it makes good designs easy to write with clear safe APIs. If you know what you are doing just create a safe wrapper over unsafe functions and do what you need.
For example you can just write a lockless triple buffer for efficient memory sharing and wrap the unsafe usage of pointers with a safe API. now you only need to pay attention to those specific unsafe calls.
It encourages good designs but it does not make them easy to write, but that's somewhat the point. Its not trivial to design a safe API that pushes performance limits.
> just write a lockless triple buffer for efficient memory sharing and wrap the unsafe usage of pointers with a safe API
This isn't practical or pragmatic.
And I say this as someone who likes rust and develops in it every day.
For example you can just write a lockless triple buffer for efficient memory sharing and wrap the unsafe usage of pointers with a safe API. now you only need to pay attention to those specific unsafe calls.