It's also very tunable. If you (or your team) hate shadowing for example, which is a common idiom in Rust but is often seen as undesirable in other languages, there are several Clippy rules you can enable for a project to either forbid specific kinds of shadowing or introduce a blanket prohibition.

Or at the other end of the scale, the average Rust programmer doesn't care that their code could panic if numbers stop making sense, for example if I'm summing the number of employees who quality for a bonus scheme, the fact that this operation (which I think might reach hundreds but likely is only dozens) could panic if it exceeds u32::MAX isn't worth linting. But if you write jet engine firmware, you need to take such "this can't happen" cases more seriously so you can turn on a lint which forbids these naive operations.

I wouldn't say it struggles to do that. And, it is part of the Rust compiler, somewhat. Every PR to the Rust compiler builds Clippy in CI and tests it (although I'm not sure if all tests are run or only part of them).

Clippy is a large collection of mostly unrelated lints, and more are always added. Understandably, they accumulate craft. I think stopping new lints for some time is a reasonable thing to do to keep a healthy codebase.