In general I agree, but this topic is IMHO exactly what separates the Rust lovers from the Rust haters ;) E.g. how strong is too strong when it comes to type systems. Rust afficionados generally seem to tend towards 'the stronger the better', and accepting the downside of a fairly rigid code base.

I prefer a middle ground between strong and weak typing (but yeah, C is arguably too weakly typed, but the exact sweet spot is different for every programmer).

A reasonably smart C compiler that has visibility on all code in a project could theoretically infer a lot of the same semantic details that must be manually provided in Rust by looking at how the pointer is used in the wider codebase (basically what static analyzers are doing by reconstructing control flows). Of course such an extensive analysis would result in even worse compile times than Rust ;)