> lacks the basic safety features to avoid dangling pointers

It doesn't. Unfortunately, C++ programmers choose not to use basic safety features for performance reasons (or aesthetics, or disagreement with the idea that a language should take into account that a programmer might make a mistake, but at least performance is a good one), but C++ actually has quite a few tricks to prevent the memory management issues that cause C/C++ bugs.

Using modern C++ safety features won't completely prevent bugs and memory issues, just like using Rust won't, but the mess that causes the worst bugs is the result of a choice, not the language itself.