The `unsafe` block was present because `List::remove` is marked `unsafe` [0]:
/// Removes the provided item from this list and returns it.
///
/// This returns `None` if the item is not in the list. (Note that by the safety requirements,
/// this means that the item is not in any list.)
///
/// # Safety
///
/// `item` must not be in a different linked list (with the same id).
pub unsafe fn remove(&mut self, item: &T) -> Option<ListArc<T, ID>> {
I think it'd be tricky at best to make this particular API safe since doing so requires reasoning across arbitrary other List instances. At the very least I don't think locks would help here, since temporary exclusive access to a list won't stop you from adding the same element to multiple lists.
Otherwise there's the question of where exactly the API boundaries are. In the most general case, your unsafe boundary is going to be the module boundary; as long as what you publicly expose is safe modulo bugs, you're good. In this case the fix was in a crate-internal function, so I suppose one could argue that the public API was/is fine.
That being said, I'm not super-familiar with the code in question so I can't definitively say that there's no way to make internal changes to reduce the risk of similar errors.
[0]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/3e0ae02ba831da2b70790...