In keeping with the tradition of bad car analogies, that's like saying "Driving cars with automatic traction control won't make accidents go away, so automatic traction control is pointless".

Languages with bounds checks on array accesses don't solve everything, but that doesn't mean that they don't work. They do remove entire classes of silent failures that can potentially slip through the cracks in C-like languages. VMs aren't needed for this -- most of the strongly typed functional languages, D, Go, Rust, and others all compile down to native machine code.

Careful API design, discipline, and good coding in C can also mitigate this sort of problem manually, although (like most things in C), it's extra work, and needs careful thought to ensure correctness.