A thought is that we use as specifically to indicate a type conversion which is dangerous, and yet the strict range (which I agree with the comments is the ‘obvious’ choice) is making it safe. So perhaps we should be using coercion for safe conversions using strict range and as should keep its current semantics of being a memory cast? The obvious problem is that when we build without overflow checks we have dangerous, implicit coercion which is very bad ™.
However, it does seem to me that a systems language restricting ‘dangerous’ casting to ‘numerically’ safe operations is also very bad. I feel like integers are almost as likely to be used to represent bitsets or other non-numeric data as they are to represent numbers and so not allowing ‘unsafe’ casting is too restrictive.