Ah, so this article invalidates all of the safety guarantees of rust? Since one hole was found the entire boat is shot and should be left at the bottom of the harbor?

C++ has a terrible reputation which is well associated with, say C++98, if you have a good linter you can bop people on the head for using news anywhere outside a few limited locations where you consider it warranted. All working environments have language features or even programming paradigms that are considered detrimental to code ecosystem health and fighting against these is an organizational lift when working in any programming language. Full type security doesn't mean someone can't create an overly generic object and just start breaking code contracts across the code base. C++ has an awful lot of footguns and more warts than most but it can be made to be sane for development and the new language features really bring it on par with other modern languages.

I have worked in C++ (primarily within the Qt framework which pushed hard into const refs instead of pointers) and it's fine. I've also worked in PHP which can also be fine. Rust isn't something I've worked at scale in but it certainly is very attractive if I ever jump to an org working in it - but even in Rust you'll want to restrict style divergence and bad patterns with linting.

I'm only talking about modern C++, not C++98. C++'s footguns include smart pointers. For example, is the following code safe?

    std::unique_ptr<int> p(foo());
    std::print("{}\n", *p);