Yes, I wish there was a way to mark code as unsafe without also allowing unsafe operations. Its quite common I have some "safe" code that generates values which are eventually used in an unsafe block. If the "safe" code is wrong, my unsafe code will fail in memory-unsafe ways. But there's currently no way to annotate this sort of "safe" code. Rust provides the unsafe keyword - but that keyword is generally reserved for code which needs to actually make unsafe operations (like derefing pointers or calling other unsafe functions).
The fact that 'unsafe' also enables all unsafe operations in the function body just makes it even messier, since you definitely _don't_ want that unless the entire body is really nothing but unsafe operations. Thus the "mark a safe function as unsafe" has a clear downside since it allows all the unsafe operations you didn't want to use.
This changed in the 2024 edition to now fire a warning lint, asking you to wrap your unsafe operations in an unsafe block, even inside an unsafe function.
There was a world where everyone just used the unsafe keyword everywhere, and Rust code crashed & had memory issues all the time.
The big thing Rust did wasn't invent borrow checking or memory safety; it's the ease of use, the defaults, and the social aspect of "if unsafe is used, a memory bug is in the unsafe part".