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.