Ultimately the point was that Rust discourages intrusive data structures, and not using an intrusive data structure turns out to be a win even though experienced C programmers might believe otherwise. Now, of course, an apples to apples comparison would be nice, but I'm sure that after some experience with Rust one might end up writing similar code in C and the difference might be very small.

The point really is that Rust foists better design choices on the programmer.