Not easy, but there are compilers that do it.
Lobster [0] started out with automatic reference counting. It has inferred static typing, specialising functions based on type, reminiscent of how Javascript JIT compilers do it. Then the type inference engine was expanded to also specialise functions based on ownership/borrowing type of its arguments. RC is still done for variables that don't fit into the ownership system but the executed ops overall got greatly reduced. The trade-off is increased code size.
I have read a few older papers about eliding reference counting ops which seem to be resulting in similar elisions, except that those had not been expressed in terms of ownership/borrowing.
I think newer versions of the Swift compiler too infer lifetimes to some extent.
When emitting Rust you could now also use reference counting smart pointers, even with cycle detection [1]. Personally I'm interested in how ownership information could be used to optimise tracing GC.
[0]:https://aardappel.github.io/lobster/memory_management.html
[1]:https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Breadth-first-Cycle-Co...
Tangentially, i was experimenting with a runtime library to expose such "borrow-first" semantics, such "lents" can be easily copied on a new thread stack to access shared memory, and are not involved in RC . Race-conditions detection helps to share memory without any explicit move to a new thread. It seems to work well for simpler data-structures like sequence/vectors/strings/dictionary, but have not figured a proper way to handle recursive/dynamic data-structures!
I'd have to do an actual project to see how annoying it is to lower semantics to unsafe Rust to know for sure, but my guess is you'd be slightly better off because you don't have to work around implicit conversions in C, the more gratuitous UBs in C, and I think I'd prefer the slightly more complete intrinsic support in Rust over C.
Snark aside, the output targets of compilers need to be unsafe languages typically, since the point of a high level compiler in general is to verify difficult proofs, then emit constructs consistent with those proof results, but simplified so that they cannot be verified anymore, but can run fast since those proofs aren't needed at runtime anymore. (Incidentally this is both a strength and weakness of C, since it provides very little ability for the compiler to do proofs, the output is generally close to the input, while other languages typically have much more useful compilers since they do much more proof work at compile time to make runtime faster, while C just makes the programmer specify exactly what must be done, and leaves the proof of correctness up to the programmer)