"In Rust that's just pushing the problem to the borrow checker and codegen which has plenty of memory corruption issues too but just calls it "bugs". In C++ you avoid those issues by reducing dynamic memory allocations to a minimum, and using checked APIs as 'safety boundaries' instead of directly poking around random arrays. Different approach but not any less safe than C++".

Both statements are pretty ridiculous. It's pretty clear that moving up in terms of the safe abstractions that are possible makes your code safer because the safety is there when you reach for that kind of programming paradigm & the programming paradigms you need are typically a property of the problem domain rather than the language (it's it's the intersection of "how is this problem solved" and "what tools does the language give you"). In C it gives you few tools and you either twist into a pretzel trying to stick to that or you write our own tools from scratch every time and make the same but different mistakes over and over. No language is perfect and all will guide you to different takes on the same problem that better suit to its paradigm, but there are intractable parts that will force you to do things (e.g. heap allocation and more involved ownership semantics are not uncommon). Moreover C very limited ability to manage your own codebase to define API boundaries - the only tool is opaque types with a defined set of functions declared in 2 different files.