Absolute power doesn't have to come with unnecessary risk everywhere. There's nothing you can do in C++ that can't also be done in Rust, the difference is that Rust keeps it safe by default and you need to go out of your way to say "Let me do this incredibly risky thing inside this specific block of code" before it lets you do anything that has any risk of leading to undefined behavior and crashes.

And it turns out, you can have all the performance advantages of C++ while almost never needing to do anything unsafe. The average Rust developer will never use the unsafe keyword in their entire career but will still write code that outperforms the average C++ developer.