Your second paragraph pretty much nails my thinking exactly. Memory safety is a very good thing, but having to manage memory/the stack/etc is kind of an IQ test that filters out contributions of generally low quality.

At least that's the theory. Thinking about it, there are probably people out there who can nail things like memory management but are terrible at eg higher-level application architecture to such an extent that they're ultimately not competent engineers anyway. It's possible at least.