I think a Rust-influenced design would have shied away from the manual direct reference count management in the first place and resulted in a fairly different-looking API; but at a minimum I'd expect that the safe wrapper `nf_tables_activate_set` would probably have existed from the beginning, and may have been designed to transfer ownership of the `nft_set` rather than just capture a reference to it.

More generally: doing a line-by-line translation from C to Rust is never going to be the best way to make use of the capabilities Rust has that C lacks.