You'll need your fenders rolled but you'll be fine on a +38.
It's not "recommended" , but look around and you'll find a billion people with that set up and doing it just fine.
You'll lose a little bit of the factory benefits in steering and put a touch more stress on your hubs. But again, I've never heard of one person complaining.
9.5" +38 will be a performance, reliability, and streetability decrease over the 8.5" +44s. It's simply too large for a street driven Subaru and the offset is too low to work well with Subaru suspension geometry (on any model, not just an '04 WRX). Not to mention that size will stick out past the fenders.
I bet the gentleman to whom you're referring also has 17x9 +42s with 245/40/17 worn out Star Specs with a one finger gap all around, a near perfect corner balance, and semi-reasonable camber settings, given the rest of his questionable setup... and he still rubs ever so slightly on the most massive of bumps, say whaaaat!
I personally have 18x9.5 +38 with a beafy 245/40 tire on my 06 STi.. My rear fenders are not rolled at all, and the fronts were ever so slightly touched up.
Seeing as you're an WRX, you probably won't need the spacer to clear brembos like I did, so your fitment would clear the front fenders even better than I do. A couple of these pictures I even had a 6mm spacer in the rear also, but it rubbed on big bumps so I ended up taking them out.
This is with extra 6mm spacer, later took it back out
this is no rear spacers
edit- Not sure if OP will even see this, hasn't replied in what is that; like a month and a half? But whatever.
I saw it and loved it!!!
And I like you wheel color too
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