Is this a joke? Systems programming is a lot about accessing APIs, dealing with all sorts of intricacies like interrupts, different execution contexts, and managing memory as you said.

If you write in C and your program is complex enough, you will spend a lot of time just chasing segfaults and concurrency bugs and getting it to work the first time you write it. If your systems programming is in userspace, that's sort of fine. But if you're in kernel or on bare metal, the cost of debugging goes up by an order of magnitude. There's no debuggers on bare metal, and nobody can tell you how your program crashed—the device just stops responding, that's it.

That's why safe languages make even more sense in these restricted environments. If you get twice fewer memory safety bugs while you're getting your program to work, that can reduce your development time like 5-6 times.