More modern styles of C++ just wholesale avoid most problems that are solved by the borrow checker. Smart and owning pointers, dynamic and checked data structures thanks to operator overloading.
There are remaining warts but not bad enough in practice.
That's not really all that relevant for most existing commercial code since legacy code tends to not get rewritten at all unless it's absolutely necessary, and thus remains stuck with the Old Ways.
Indeed, but unlike a rewrite, you can refactor staying in the same language at your leisure, piece-wise.
Plus the argument was mostly pertaining to new code.