[lumost]

This is certainly valid for some number of uses, however there isn't a good way of mapping all reasonable uses of linked structures to unlinked structures except via associative array.

There are many linked structures such as an Linked hashmap or LRU cache that can’t be efficiently represented in safe rust. There are engineers who need to code and use such structures outside of an interview context, these engineers must use unsafe to code valid programs.

I honestly wouldn’t mind if the docs were simply upfront on the need to use unsafe and the insufficiency of any alternative for these situations. Long ago it was thought that users would simply use something along the lines of GC<Type> to handle these situations, but none of the rust GC projects materialized.