Thoughts and clarifications

Not at all, not to the extent it does with Rust.

In C, if you change a structure to be reference-counted, the compiler does nothing to ensure you manage the reference counts correctly. In Rust it does.

In C, if you add a mutex to protect some data, the compiler does nothing to ensure you actually hold the mutex before accessing the data. In Rust it does.

In C, if you change the width or signedness of an integer member or variable, the compiler does nothing to ensure you actually update the type of any variables it's copied to or passed into, and it will happily let you truncate or convert integers, even with -Wall. In Rust it won't compile until you change all the types or add explicit casts, and you probably won't even need to touch any code that just creates temporary bindings since Rust has type inference for that and C does not (without extensions like __auto_type or weird macros).

In C, if you need to add cleanup code to a structure that was previously just freed with free(), you need to find all the sites where it is freed and change them to call a helper that does the extra cleanup manually. In Rust none of this code exists to begin with since freeing is automatic, you just implement the `Drop` trait on the struct to add extra cleanup code and you're done, no need to refactor anything at all.