Funny. I would think a GCed language was safer - maybe Haskell being the safest of all (outside even more niche languages) for its ability to encode so much in the type system.

Yet, for some curious reason, a substantial group of snake oil salesmen insist that only this one particularly cut puzzle piece (rust) fits the bill.

Who, exactly?

It has been known for decades that GC was one way to achieve memory safety. That was one of the main selling point of Java back in the 90s - no more segfaults.

Rust was an absolute breakthrough, because it provides a second way to gain memory safety, this time without the significant drawbacks of a garbage collector, bringing memory safety to systems programming. That's materially different.

The only other previous attempt at this was Ada, which for a variety of reasons never quite fit the bill despite its obvious strengths.

Also you gotta write the garbage collector itself in some language that isn't itself garbage collected - usually C or C++, before Rust existed.

Anyway, it's basically slander to say that people advocating Rust are snake oil salesman. Rust is a genuine improvement to systems languages over the existing options (primarily C/C++) in multiple respects, not just memory safety; it is not a panacea that solves every problem or eliminates every possible bug, and no one involved with the project ever claimed that it did.