This is the right way of viewing it. What unsafe means to a person is fairly irrelevant. What it means to the compiler is 'please insert this code where I have

This is the right way of viewing it. What unsafe means to a person is fairly irrelevant. What it means to the compiler is 'please insert this code where I have checked the guarantees rather than you'. Doing this a lot in pure Rust is a bad smell because you usually have other options and you're opening yourself up to risk. In this case the code exists and you already own all that risk so it's perfectly reasonable.