In general I agree and suspect that memory safety is a tool that will continue to pay dividends for some time.

But there are tradeoffs and more ways to write correct and 'safe' code than doing it in a "memory safe" language. If frontier models indeed are a step function in finding vulnerabilities, then they're also a step function in writing safer code. We've been able to write safety critical C code with comprehensive testing for a long time (with SQLite presenting a well known critique of the tradeoffs).

The rub has been that writing full coverage tests, fuzzing, auditing, etc. has been costly. If those costs have changed, then it's an interesting topic to try to undertand how.