No, memory safety is not security, Rust's memory guarantees eliminate some issues, but they also create a dangerous overconfidence, devs treat the compiler as a security audit and skip the hard work of threat modeling
A vigilant C programmer who manually validates everything and use available tools at its disposal is less risky than a complacent Rust programmer who blindly trust the language
I agree with this. But for a component whose job is to parse data and produce pixels, the security worries I have are memory ones. It's not implementing a permissions model or anything where design and logic are really important. The security holes an image codec would introduce are the sort where it a buffer overun gave an execution primitive (etc.).
You can get an awful lot done very quickly in C if you aren't bothered about security - and traditionally, most of the profession has done exactly that.
What about against a vigilant Rust programmer who also manually validates everything and uses available tools at its disposal?
So, a fairy-tale character?