> Would a beginner see the benefits of rust without first understanding the drawbacks of C?

Better, it would make him aware of C's shortcomings when the time comes to learn C, instead of getting the wrong idea C is the only path to systems programming.

I learned systems programming back in the 80's via Assembly, Turbo Basic, quickly followed by Turbo Pascal.

When the time came to learn C, I was already on Turbo Pascal 6.0, and the frustrating part was being aware that there was already a better way of talking to the machine.

Also another point, was that C pointers were never confusing to me, because I learned the best practices in those languages.