Just understanding the rules are not enough, you also need to be consistently good so that you never make a mistake that gets into production.

On both your average days and your bad days.

Over the 40 to 50 years that your carer lasts.

I guess those kind of developers exist, but I know that I'm not one of them.

I am pretty confident that a language with syntax that allows you to feel that freedom that C gives you AND is safe to write software with (without garbage collection) is possible, we just need to come up with a reasonable syntax that has both of those features. It won't look like C or Go or any of that, I don't think.

I am not a computer scientist (I have no degree in CS) but it sure seems like it would be possible to determine statically if a reference could be misused in code as written without requiring that you be the Rust Borrow Checker, if the language was designed with those kinds of things from the beginning.