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.

> Who, exactly?

I'm on your side of this, but there are Rust zealots out there and they're incredibly annoying.

(Edit to add:)

As a longtime Java guy (after a decade or so as a C++ guy) what drew me to Rust wasn't actually memory safety; that was table-stakes for me and Go might have lured me in if that was all I wanted. The low-cost (cognitive complexity is a cost) of memory safety was a factor, but it was the expressive type system that sealed the deal.