> They also count data race freedom as part of memory safety, which I think is wrong (and contradicts their inclusion of Java and even Go in the list of memory safe languages).

For Java, there's no contradiction if you define data race freedom as "data races cannot cause arbitrary memory corruption / UB".

> And ive never heard “memory safe” used in relation to not having null pointer exceptions. That’s a new one and sounds nonsensical, frankly

I was also surprised, but it's what I was told by people working on verification of Java programs. And you can see e.g. at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-030-1750... that people are proving memory safety of Java programs, which would not make sense at all if all Java programs are memory safe by construction.