What exactly people mean by "safe(r)" makes all the difference.

It's simply not possible to include all the nuance of safety of a language and all software written in it a single word. This leads to all kinds of miscommunication and strawmanning.

Rust's official line is specific memory safety guarantees, with caveats that it must not be broken by unsafe code, the OS, compiler bugs may happen, etc. Rust also has a bunch of best-effort features that steer users towards more robust code, but can't guarantee it.

This gets twisted in both directions:

- people ignore the caveats and limitations, pretending that Rust promised zero bugs ever, and use any bug in any Rust program as a proof by contradiction that Rust's claims are false.

- or focus solely on the caveats, ignoring all the advancements and incremental improvements, and take a "then why even bother?" There are classes of bugs Rust can't stop. Nothing is foolproof for a sufficiently advanced fool, and an infallible programmer could write bug-free code in any language, which creates a false equivalence between languages.