If you're really, really good at C, you'll have realized that Rust doesn't add much to what you need to do. You're already doing what Rust does, you're just doing it manually without compiler support. Rust didn't create the issues associated with borrowing things, it merely surfaced them. They're always there, in any language you use, and since C is so manual, you better have figured that out if you plan on using it at a high level. I write mostly in Go, but I'm constantly tracking "ownership" issues in my language despite not having a "borrow checker", because the borrow checker doesn't create the issue.

Plus if you're using C at a high level you ought to be using a static analyzer anyhow, that may not impose the exact same restrictions on you as Rust, but should be imposing enough discipline on you that using Rust doesn't seem so foreign.