I'll say the same thing I said to you as I said to Andrew, last time he and I talked about this: the way that everyone talks about memory safety (with maybe two exceptions, one okay (go) and one I dislike (fil-c)) is that "memory safe language" is about there being a clear delineation between what is memory safe and what is not, and that the unsafe aspect is a superset. Rust and Java both are memory safe, except where explicitly demarcated as not (unsafe in Rust, JNI or sun.misc.unsafe or whatever in Java). Zig and C have no such separation. When I (and others) talk about wanting memory safety, this is the important aspect of the design. This is what enables the "I know statically that a large part of the code is safe, and I also know where to check if something goes wrong" aspect of things.
So that could be a clear definition, but for it to be "table stakes" it needs to have some universal value and it doesn't (in fact, that very same definition could also classify even C as "memory safe"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087458
zig creates an ir that you can use to do data dependency analysis and borrow checking.
Would you mind sharing some thoughts about fil-c? AFAICT its claims mostly check out so besides implementation details (GC?) it seems directionally good.