This would be anecdotal, and caused massive stir in the community when it was realized.

And a lot of the usages were promptly fixed when people made a stink about it.

It was only fixed when a fuzzer showed a lot of vulnerabilities. Up until then the attitude was "stop demonizing unsafe, we know what we're doing."

I don't know about those particular authors. However, the vibe I get from the rust community as a whole is "unsafe is where dragons lay". Most, I'd say, treat it just like inline asm in C++. Sometimes a necessary evil, but not something you should be in the habit of using.

Actix is currently popular, but only because the rest of the ecosystem has been waiting for `async-await`, and taking a slow-and-steady approach to getting things right. I'd expect Actix's popularity to take a dramatic downturn right about when Rocket releases a async version that runs on stable Rust.