I think it's too early to tell if rust will prove any better in the real world, which includes things like devs using unsafe sections to cope with time pressures.
Use of unsafe in Rust is not required or recommended in most, if not all situations. That said, auditing a handful of small unsafe blocks is easier than auditing an entire project.
The question then is whether large chunks in unsafe is still better than the entire program in the equivalent of unsafe (C).