The Rust for Linux project has designed safe intrusive linked lists for use in the kernel, and while they're inconvenient to use, this and other things have led to the push to creating language features to improve the scenario.

As for the C camp, I agree it's different. The problem is that we don't know a way to design memory safe GC-free language without it being big and complex. Maybe it is possible. But until we figure out how, projects that need to be memory safe (which I believe is the vast majority of projects, although not all of them) will probably use Rust (and probably should use Rust), even if they would prefer to be pure C, because memory safety is just more important.