To be fair the increased reliability of Rust code over C++ isn't just because of memory errors (out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-free, type confusion, etc). You also get:
* No undefined behaviour (outside `unsafe`, which is quite easy to avoid). In C++ there are many many sources of UB that aren't really memory errors directly, e.g. signed integer overflow or forgetting to `return` from a function.
* A much stronger type system.
Those two things have a really significant impact on reliability.
Rust's "A language empowering everyone..." tagline also helps justify the heavy lifting needed to prevent you shooting yourself in the foot, because we're all able to imagine a hypothetical less experienced programmer who might make a mistake even as we swear that we'd never make it ourselves.
To be fair the increased reliability of Rust code over C++ isn't just because of memory errors (out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-free, type confusion, etc). You also get:
* No undefined behaviour (outside `unsafe`, which is quite easy to avoid). In C++ there are many many sources of UB that aren't really memory errors directly, e.g. signed integer overflow or forgetting to `return` from a function.
* A much stronger type system.
Those two things have a really significant impact on reliability.
Rust's "A language empowering everyone..." tagline also helps justify the heavy lifting needed to prevent you shooting yourself in the foot, because we're all able to imagine a hypothetical less experienced programmer who might make a mistake even as we swear that we'd never make it ourselves.