Yeah, this just isn't how it is anymore. The last time I was up shit creek because 50k boxes were crash looping and GDB couldn't get me a stack trace was in 2014. The last time I spent more than 30 minutes chasing a memory corruption issue was in like, 2018. And it was because some wise ass had decided to roll his own fibers by stomping on `rip`, `rbp`, and `rsp`.
These days you use `std::unique_ptr`, build with clang-tidy, CI under ASAN, and it's never an issue in practice. Once in a blue moon the CI chirps an ASAN failure that gives you the entire history of the memory address with line numbers and you fix the typo.
The safety that Rust gives me is that it's more expressive type system and modern affordances for things like exhaustive pattern matching lets me avoid logic errors, which are every bit as deadly as buffer overruns and much harder to mechanically identify.
It is usually easier to write correct code in Rust than in C++ because it's much more modern and frankly kind of an everyman's Haskell (which I mean as a compliment). But it's intellectually dishonest to say that this doesn't come at a cost: when you wander out of the borrow checker's sweet spot it can become kind of a Tetris puzzle even when you know all the rules on paper.
The same pattern matching that lets people see a borrow checker puzzle and immediately say "right, we need to do X" is the pattern matching that let's a C++ hacker see a failed template instantiation and immediately know what got misspelled.