It’s maybe a weakness if you dont know what you’re doing

The experience of the last 30 years or so of critical security holes across all types of organisations and individuals due to memory bugs seems to indicate that no one knows what they are doing

This statement is incredibly naive. I know exactly what I'm doing with C++ and yet it's still incredibly easy to introduce subtle bugs as soon as you're developing anything moderately complex, especially when async or threading are involved. It's not that I'm unaware of what problems may happen, it's that the language expresses itself poorly and a subtle typo or innocent assumption can lead to catastrophic failures that might only surface in 0.0001% of the times that a certain line of code is run.

I used to consider C++ my favorite language by an enormous margin because I assumed that we just have to accept the danger to get the benefit of performance. I used to eagerly follow developments coming from the C++ ISO committee, excited for the language improvements that would be coming down the line.

Then I started playing with Rust and learned what it's like to get incredible performance without being mired in hazards. Imagine outperforming C++ on average while also having your code almost always work perfectly the first time you compile it and never crash or segfault. That's Rust, and once you give it a fair try, you'll never want to go back to C++.

Being able to manipulate raw pointers with no guardrails ever is not a strength, it's a terrible weakness, and you'll live a happier life the sooner you realize that. Consider instead if you could have all the same level of control over memory except the compiler tells you whenever you're doing something asinine before you run it. You can always force it to do what you're asking for by declaring it unsafe but you'll quickly realize that you never actually want that.