The point is that many of the problems rust aims to solve become much less relevant. For example, if your program only does 10 Malloc and frees, you can probably track down the memory bugs.
I agree that these techniques help you write better code, but enforcing something is better than not. Obviously it’s a spectrum, so I wouldn’t say doing that is bad, but it does not really mean Rust is irrelevant.
And Rust brings more to the table than just the borrow checker.
I’m not sure I would characterize it this way, but it doesn’t satisfy the criteria of “memory safety by default,” which is what more and more organizations are desiring.
And Rust brings more to the table than just the borrow checker.