I would answer that you can use Rust to your first question.

But I agree with your general sentiment that currently C/C++ is the only choice for certain domains. But there is nothing theoretically stopping us from creating safer system languages. (See Rust and Swift, much less so Swift. But Apple is working towards that goal with the option to disable reference counting in a future version which will give much more predictable performance.)

My argument is that we need to stop pretending that C/C++ is not worth improving. Every time someone criticizes a gotcha of C/C++ HN gets very defensive. We need to kill our gods if we want better ones and I personally think we need better system programming languages because it is far too easy to write bad C/C++ code.