I totally agree that modern c++ is pretty robust if you are both a well seasoned developer and only stick to a very blessed subset of it's features and avoid the historical baggage.

However, that's obviously not the point? Ignoring the idea that people can/should just "git gud" and write perfect code in a language with lots of old traps, you can't control how everyone else writes their code, even on your own team once it gets big enough. And there will always be junior devs stumbling into the bear traps of c/c++ (even if the rest of the codebase is all modern c++). So no matter how many great new features get added to C++, until (never) they start taking away the bad ones, the danger inherent to writing in that language doesn't go away.

Also, safe != non-UB. TFA isn't so much about memory safety anyway.