Sure, but don't forget the inherent trade-off - Rust allows you to write safer code at the cost of getting in the way. It simplifies some things and makes other things very complex. It empowers average devs that can suddenly write certain types of system services easily and be reasonably sure they work as intended, but it gets in the way of advanced devs writing core systems.
This sounds an awful lot like how everyone thinks they're an exceptional driver and everyone else is bad. Reality is no one's actually that great at piloting a ton of metal at speeds their brains can't keep up with in an uncontrolled environment.
Anyways, unsafe exists so that if rust is genuinely in your way you can still do what you need to do.
Even C++ requires inline/linked assembler code in certain system cases to squeeze out maximum performance - why would you think Rust is an exception? It has nothing to do with elitism.
If we're talking about raw performance then I'm baffled at what you're talking about to begin with. Rust can link with assembly just as well as c++ and I believe inline asm was stabilized a while ago. Otherwise it's llvm doing the heavy lifting on optimization so clang++ or rust is not much different.
Other than the fact that rust can rely on much much stricter aliasing rules and do a bit better on some optimizations because of it.
Usually when people talk about rust getting in their way they mean the borrow checker, which you can ask to get out of your way and it will still prevent bugs around the unsafe code. Bugs that "advanced programmers" are also prone to, especially around concurrency.
The idea that some programmers are so good they don't make simple but consequential mistakes in code that deals in concurrency and memory management is absolutely elitism.
There is no programmer on the planet who can't benefit from the borrow checker, and if there are any who will benefit less than they are "hindered" by it, there are almost certainly vanishingly few.
