It's typical SJW narrative. People are tired of it, it's like the boy who cried wolf story. Hopefully at some point people will just learn to ignore these "woke" SJWs as they have their tantrums.
It's much more than just null pointer dereferencing. Time and time again, it's been proven that Rust protects even very experienced C++ programmers from bugs they didn't realize they're even making.
Thanks for the links. That being said, new developments in GCs on the JVM (like Shenandoah and ZGC) are yielding very impressive results. Things like < 1ms pause times for heaps in the TB range. No other free GC for any other language approaches this as far as I'm aware, including golang's which people claim is fast, but completely gets destroyed for even heaps in the GB range (I did some benchmarks).
While RAII is a very good technique, it is not the solution to all issues here. I read that some concurrent datastructure implementations would not be possible without a GC. Furthermore, when a project reaches a certain level of complexity, it ends up implementing GC anyway (see Unreal engine).
> Go has a garbage collector, and it's the fastest garbage collector that currently exists, by a wide margin, I believe.
Fastest by what measure? I benchmarked some key value store implementation written in golang and ran into large (> 1 sec) latency spikes because the golang gc couldn't keep up with the large (10GB+) heap space. Java would have allowed me to select a GC algorithm that's best for my use case and I wouldn't have run into that issue.
golang's gc is tuned for latency at the expense of throughput, that's basically it. It's not some magic bullet that solved the gc issue, contrary to what the golang marketing team wants people to believe.