Which claims do you think are exaggerated?
I am fully able to appreciate that memory safety is important and Rust stepped up the game in mainstream programming. I think this is cool. But the exclusive and exaggerated focus on this does more harm than good. Memory safety is certainly much more important for advertisement companies such as Google to secure their mobile spying platforms than it is for me. The religious drive to push Rust everywhere to achieve a relatively modest[1] practical improvement in memory safety clearly shows that some part of the community rather naively adopted the priorities of certain tech companies at the cost of other - maybe more relevant - things.
1. I am fully able to understand the 100% guarantees that Rust can provide when sticking to safe Rust are conceptionally a fundamental step forward compared to what C provides out of the box. But this should not be misrepresented as a huge practical step forward to what can be achieved in memory safety already in C/C++ if one cares about it.
Let's not pretend that anything is better on the traditional C/C++ side, where the approach is usually one or more of:
1. Vendoring dependencies in-tree. This can result in security problems from missing out on bugfixes upstream.
2. Reinventing functionality that would otherwise be served by a dependency. This can result in security problems from much less battle-tested, buggy in-house implementation. In closed-source code, this is effectively security by obscurity.
I've seen both of these cause issues in large C++ projects.
For reference, the Rust/Cargo ecosystem contains a lot of tools and infrastructure to address supply-chain security, but it will always be a difficult problem to solve.
Regardless it is cargo, vcpkg/conan, nuget, maven, npm,....
It isn't validated by legal and IT for upload into internal repos, doesn't get used.
In many scenarios you have to use "unsafe"
The question is how difficult it is avoid writing such overflows.
e.g. signed overflow is not an issue at all because you just tell your compiler to turn them into traps.
In regards to memory safety being the biggest issue, I'm referencing the "70% of high severity bugs" numbers that have been put out by Microsoft and the Chrome teams and repeated by CISA in their memory safety roadmaps.
It's great that you haven't experienced large numbers of memory safety issues, but I can only speak to the lived experience of heartbleed and others. I see memory safety issues daily. I don't see supply chain attacks frequently and given how much publicity accompanied the discovery of the XZ attack, I suspect that's true for others.
Microsoft and Google have a ton of legacy code, they need to have high performance because they’re pushing everything to the web in order to spy better on people, they always churn their software and they are a very juicy target. As far as I’m concerned, they should rewrite everything in Rust and stop telling other people what to do.
But of course, they also need to sell Rust to the public, otherwise they would run out of developers or would have to maintain everything themselves. Hence the cheerleading.
This blog post is much closer to the reality of using Rust in production. In fact I’d add a couple of pitfalls myself:
* original cheerleader gets bored of the Rust rewrite/moves on and the project dies.
* original cheerleader moves on and the project lives under maintenance with non-Rust programmers which do not enjoy working on it and delay and reject changes and/or feature requests.
Or perhaps you're missing the super-text, that all those things were insufficient to make C safe.
The "memory safety" of rust is oversold since "safety" is not formally proven for the rust language. While anecdotally memory-related bugs seem less likely, rust without unsafe is not absolutely safe.