The answer seems to be that the applications [1] are written in Rust using gtk-rs [2] (Rust-bindings for the GTK libs).
[1]: https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/repositories?q=&type=source&l...
[2]: https://gtk-rs.org/
[1]: https://github.com/orgs/pop-os/repositories?q=&type=source&l...
[2]: https://gtk-rs.org/
My understanding is that you don't get any memory safety/performance advantage from using Rust because gtk can still be unsafe.
Is this correct?