It's not about ceremony - it's disingenuous to say that C++ can enforce the same safety rules as Rust w.r.t. to lifetimes or that C++ is as safe as Rust is within it's unsafe blocks.
Whilst currently the borrow checker is a bit greedy, it's safe to say that most of the time the borrow checker is checking the code is safe the same way I try to reason about memory accesses in C and C++ when dealing with concurrency or freeing memory. The power of the borrow checker shows itself when reasoning about a local function and no longer requires you to reason about the whole application state as the compiler ensures locality to the extent that shared mutable state is not allowed.
