I think this is probably the reason why Rust is attractive to companies. They can say, "use Rust and never use unsafe without sign-off from some senior program

I think this is probably the reason why Rust is attractive to companies. They can say, "use Rust and never use unsafe without sign-off from some senior programmer" and then can be relatively sure there is no buffer overflow. In C you would say, you need to follow these guidelines with tools X, Y, Z and then you can be relatively sure there is no buffer overflow. The problem is that this is a striking argument only when the only thing you care about are memory safety issues. As soon as you care about other forms of security / correctness, you need "guidelines with tools X, Y, Z" anyway. And when you have mixed code base, you also need this anyway.