> that's the point I made.

That's not the way I read your original comment. When you said "it's a universal tradeoff, that is: Safety is less ergonomic", to me the implication is that gaining safety must result in losing ergonomics and vice versa. The existence of languages that are as safe/safer than Rust and more ergonomic than Rust would seem to be a natural counterexample since they have gained safety over Zig/C/C++ and haven't (necessarily, depending on the exact language) sacrificed ergonomics to do so.

> One can fail, or artificially make a language less ergonomic and that doesn't mean that fixing that somehow has an effect on the safety tradeoff.

To be honest that case didn't even cross my mind when I wrote my original comment. I was assuming we were working at the appropriate Pareto frontier.

> So obviously it is when safety and ergonomics are each already maximized that pushing one or the other results in a tradeoff.

Assuming no other relevant axes are available, sure.

> Anyways I was holding performance constant in all of this because the underlying assumption of Rust and Zig and Odin and C is that performance will make no sacrifices.

Sure. Might have been nice to include that assumption in your original comment, but even then I'm not sure it's too wise to ignore the performance axis completely due to the existence of safe implementations of otherwise "unsafe" languages (e.g., Zig's ReleaseSafe, GCs for C like Fil-C, etc.) that trade off performance for safety instead of ergonomics.