Annoyingly, these bugs still bring down our systems in an age when we're on the verge of self-driving cars. Can you imagine that? Your car can crash because somewhere a programmer messed up a simple bounds check.

By removing the possibility of these small annoying bugs, you leave the programmer free to focus on the big picture. That is the entire point of abstraction, and a language which strives to provide these abstractions at no cost to performance is inherently better than one that

a) doesn't provide these abstractions

b) doesn't provide mechanisms to handle the unabstracted layer safely.