> cars are to be driven by qualified humans only

As a Rust programmer I'm fine with cars driven by dogs, I just want that to be clearly acknowledged as unsafe, and if that car is be driven in public roads, I would also like a safety comment stating all the precautions taken to make that safe for others, preferably reviewed by the police as well.

I for one don't care about memory safety. Rust makes it easier to compose software by expressing everything in your function/module signature. This is what OOP aimed to do, but was quite prescriptive (a datatype often isn't the natural unit of encapsulation). It maximizes local reasoning, so you can make changes to a large codebase with less understanding of uses elsewhere, and reuse functionality in new ways without changes.

C#, Go, Swift are (mostly) memory safe, but I don't think they provide this level of modularity or broader reliability. Expressive interfaces/contracts are useful for all sorts of things, you can use them for memory management but for me that's almost a by-product. I certainly don't consider it a restriction on the kinds of program you can write