I am not a Rust guy (yet?). Are safe and super fast mutually exclusive? As I reas the article I sensed your explanation was probably the case. Did the many safety-making patches cause the performance to go down?
Not so much mutually exclusive as "safe, fast, easy, pick two", at least sometimes. It can take a lot of design effort to come up with a safe and efficient way to do some things, so it's often tempting to do something unsafe and efficient and hope it works out.