> C and C++ projects have been empirically observed to have orders of magnitude more memory safety problems than projects written in other languages do.

Note that this includes projects in languages that are themselves written in C or C++, which shows that there's some value in confining the unsafe code to a small and well-tested core library (in this case, the language runtime). Honestly, it seems like 50% of the value just comes from not using C strings, since pretty much every other language has its own string library that does not use null-termination.