Sure, but that's not a design philosophy C++ adheres to. Look at the modern C++ guidelines or profiles. The entire point is to rule out large swathes of safe, legitimate, and valid code in an optional and interoperable way.

C++ isn't beholden to Rust's trade-offs either. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities that don't require broken backwards compatibility. Hence: "Why draw the line specifically at lifetime annotations?"

That's what the unsafe keyword is for.