That's one of those misguided deep sounding statements that are based in a fundamental lack of knowledge. What you, or this guy at the CS department, said is completely bullshit, evidenced by simple statistics of memory safety in languages. There is a reason many big companies are adopting Rust, and it's not just because "they feel like it" or they lack coders that "can program in C". E.g. take a look at: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...
Rust works because the Rust type system and development environment are tutors. They train up the developer like magic nannies until they learn how to correctly manage memory.
So the power of Rust comes from the the cooperation of the developer with the compiler and development environment willing to work through their severe instruction.
Developers in general unwilling to learn how to manage memory walk away from Rust based devteams.
Ok, there's still Java, Kotlin, Go and other memory safe languages in the sense of that they are statistically way less likely to have any memory related bugs compared to C, C++ or similar low-level no GC, no reference counting languages and thus the original argument of "good developers" not doing memory related bugs as well as "Java is as unsafe as C after a certain size" is utter bullshit.
