I think you are overestimating the expressive power of lifetime annotations in rust, and how smart the borrow checker is

If only 50% of the community didn't think it was their job to scream at complete strangers for using that part of the language.

Agreed (unfortunately). There is too much of an obsession in avoiding unsafe at all costs in my opinion. When you consider all C/C++ is effectively written in an unsafe block then it seems a bit ludicrous to assume you would never ever use unsafe in tight, performant code.