This feels like a gross generalization that's not applicable in many situations, and is immensely dependent on each individual person and situation.

I can write non-trivial performant code in Rust, including bindings across a C FFI much faster than I can weave together the equivalent code and build scripts in C++. Memory safety isn't the only thing Rust brings to the table. I sometimes don't because C++'s ecosystem is far developed for a certain application and it's not worth it for that particular situation. As with most things, it's about trade-offs.