It does not, for slice indexing Rust is just as bad. My best guess is that this will likely blow up into such a big issue that the Rust devs are going to be forced to implement a feature to disable indexing (and leave just the safe .get()), or the kernel devs will fork the core library.

But Rust prevents a myriad of other things that would be panics in Zig or undefined behavior in C. It has a really strong type system, capable of reducing a large amount of invalid states and keeping many invariants throughout very large codebases.

Static checks remove many more potential sources of panic. I suspect that with certain restraint one can write Rust code that is statically guaranteed to not panic.

Also, Rust's panics may be recoverable, it's not necessarily fatal.