> My take is that there are two types of programmers: those who admit they can't avoid making memory safety mistakes, and real programmers, who don't make such mistakes, and happily keep programming in C/++.

I absolutely agree. There's a class of programmers that would rarely if ever make such mistakes (e.g., Torvalds), and to them, C is freeing.

For the rest of us lesser programmers, the handrails of a borrow checker are necessary.