[whytevuhuni]

Not quite, you also need to keep pointer non-nullness, alignment and aliasing safety in Rust, which is very pervasive in Rust (all shared/mutable references) but very rare in C (the 'restricted' keyword).

In Rust, it's not just using an invalid reference that causes UB, but their very creation, even if temporary. For example, since references have to always be aligned, the compiler can assume the pointer they were created from was also aligned, and so suddenly some ending bits from the pointer are ignored (since they must've been zero).

And usually the point of unsafe is to make safe wrappers, so unafe Rust makes or interacts with safe shared/mutable references pretty often.

[creata]

It's just hard for me to imagine someone accidentally messing up nonnullness or aliasing, because it's really in-your-face that you need to be careful when constructing a reference unsafely. There are even idiomatic methods like ptr::as_ref to avoid accidentally creating null references.