I see Rust as a counterexample, serving as a formalization of provably safe patterns of manual memory management. I do wish it made it easier to write human-checked code the compiler cannot verify; unsafe code is so painful with unnecessary pitfalls, that many people write either wrong-but-ergonomic unsafe code (https://github.com/mcoblenz/Bronze/, https://github.com/emu-rs/snes-apu) or add runtime overhead (Rc and RefCell).