I don't think this is a sarcasm, as a long standing Rust user myself, I don't think the community should preach out by "memory safety" -- rather the structural change in coding mindset and new ideas such as ADT and generic programming, while retaining mostly zero-cost like C++ without the bearing of C++ complexity (that includes a compiler that spits out 300 lines of compiler error just because I missed one Memory safety is just what Rust inherited from C++ smart pointers with a stronger linear/affine type system twist, especially regarding move semantics, cloning and borrowing rules. What makes it powerful is the various language features it also incorporated from Cilk/C#/OCaml/Haskell.
Right now Rust and Zig is my two favourite middle ground. It is sad that Zig went completely sod-off-to-LLM mode but the most devastating aspect of Zig is that it is way too Linux focused. A lot of the code in Zig I cannot compile on Windows, plus the major changes to IO interface and the colorless function fiasco is really making me question the stability of Zig.
This recent event led me to displace Zig and replaced it with Nim, which emits C code instead and having a really powerful algebraic language system, while getting some benefits of Rust such as scoped smart pointer (I think they call it ORC), or using simple mark and sweep arena collector or even full-blown Boehm GC.
Right now I'm trying to create a distribution of Nim in a single binary (with musl and mingw packed together) and using tcc as the backend, all in a single binary with Rust and an internal project to convert wasm 3.0 and wasi proposal 1 modules into Rust code, which the Nim compiler and TCC are both compiled to WASIp1 first, then term-rewritten/transpiled to Rust (think w2c2 or wasm2c, but targets Rust, I found some nice structuralism of Rust and wasm lately)