But that's not Rust's actual tradeoff. Safe Rust prevents data races not because they were separately considered as a tradeoff, but because its particular chosen design for memory safety requires it. It's a side-effect, not an orthogonal feature.

And I wasn't saying there's an actual slippery slope, only that the argument that if something is tricky it should be moved out of the safe subset is not a good one. The justification Rust uses to do this for memory safety is because memory safety was empirically found to be special, but that particular justification doesn't work for concurrency (nor is it the one used; again, in Rust this is a side-effect).