Cool kids may talk about memory safety but ultimately someone had to take care of it, either in their code or abstracted out of it.
If anything the cool kids are rediscovering what we lost in systems programming safety due to the wide adoption of C, and its influence in the industry, because the cool kids from 1980's decided memory safety wasn't something worth caring about.
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"
Guess what programming language he is referring to by "1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson".
IMO it is young people that have trouble understanding.
The same mistakes are made over and over, lessons learned long ago are ignored in the present
It easier to write than read, easier to talk than listen, build new than expand the old
This can be a strength, to be fair - the human mind really does tend to get stuck in a rut based on familiarity, and someone new to the domain can spot solutions that others haven't because of that. But more often, it turns into futile attempts to solve problems while forgetting the lessons of the past.