Same thing will happen to unsafe rust once it becomes ubiquitous and we will be back talking about how to fix the problem of stupid coders
A great deal of Rust code need not ever involve the unsafe block, and in these cases there is no great temptation to stray off this path. This is pretty good, imo.
Rust was an attempt to have the compiler manage memory, but they couldn't crack it, so they had to just push all the failures to conquer c style UB under rusts unsafe keyword...
Good codebases already do what rust is doing with the borrow checker, it's not rocket science.
There's a serious argument for cherry picking rusts good parts and Retrofitting them into a more entrenched language.
Rust allows you to achieve with syntax what these good codebases achieve through diligence. You're right that it isn't rocket science, but it's demonstrably challenging, given that plenty of people get it wrong.
People are certainly trying to bring more safety to existing languages (in various ways), and that's only a good thing.
Rustaeceans often play this card... What you should really say is safe rust achieves it through syntax, yet as a systems language you will need to invoke unsafe rust, which by definition is not "memory safe". And memory unsafe is bad right? So bad it's worth changing the language to avoid it.... Yet rust doesnt avoid it?
I'm just not as impressed by that as you are
This isn't generally the case.