I don't really agree with that framing. Most of the languages people use to write web apps are safe! The actual tradeoff rust is making is that performance is more important than developer productivity. It's not willing to sacrifice safety for productivity, but fundamentally the reason to use rust is that it's fast.

If you don't need performance, you might be better off using any number of safe, GC languages. (That said, I actually find the ergonomics of Rust nicer than most other languages. A rust-like language with a GC would be very nice for web backends imo.)