Additional notes on the context: this is the third attempt to implement a non-trivial version of `VecDeque::append`, the last two are reverted due to unsoundness or regression, see:
- https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/52553, reverted in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/53571
- https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/53564, reverted in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/54851