The comparison is contrived precisely because he's comparing it to other memory-safe languages. The borrow checker was introduced because the goal of the language was a memory safe language without a runtime. Falling back to indices isn't "ironic", its exactly how you would solve the problem in C/C++.

If your argument is "well Rust should be like Julia and have a GC", well thats not Rust. That language also exists, its possibly called OCaml, but its not Rust.