Yeah, that's my point. Even though, unlike C++, (safe) Rust was designed to be (memory) safe from the start, it's notable that Rust and C++ end up (or will soon end up) in the same place - a "usable" safe language and an unsafe superset of that language. It's notable because before C++11, memory safe subsets of C++ could be considered not really "usable". But since the advent of C++11, there are memory safe subsets of C++ that are comparable to Rust in usability and performance [1].
I should have said I think you are operating under false assumptions, are making invalid comparisons, and are therefore drawing unwarranted conclusions.
I think you might be confused about what Rust offers and from where Rust's safety is derived. There is no "safe subset" of Rust. As far as I know, that is a nonsense phrase.
I think nonsense is rather too strong: Rust-banning-`unsafe` is a subset of the full language accepted by the compiler, and is safe. It isn't rare that people talk about the subset of Rust ignoring `unsafe`.
[1] https://github.com/duneroadrunner/SaferCPlusPlus#safercplusp...