C++ [relies] on manual memory management

not exactly. i can't remember the last time i new'd or deleted anything at work. not only do we have smart pointers for over a decade now, but also, most of the time, you don't even want to be allocating stuff on the heap anyway, so raii will take care of managing your resources. memory management in c++ is explicit, but it's mostly automatic

yeah it's not as safe as rust, but idiomatic c++ isn't supposed to be littered with new and delete statements. that's indication of java-like c++ code, which has been the true villain in c++ codebases for decades, imo. most shitty c++ code is java-like c++ code written by people who would rather be coding in java (or java++ aka c#)