Yes, I just translated a Rust library from non-idiomatic and unsafe Rust to idiomatic and safe Rust and it was as much work as if I had rewritten it from scratch.

yeah, matches what I'd expect. when you're porting idiomatic -> idiomatic within a language, the cleanup is mechanical. crossing from C++ to Rust means the borrow checker surfaces assumptions that were latent in the original code, so you end up redesigning rather than translating. that's not a complaint about Rust -- it's actually doing its job.

This is what I was trying to highlight in my post.