I think the lesser amount of libraries and lacking the chance of fine-tuning performance (but also your risk of screwing up your performance badly) is a very low price for the provably impossibility to have a mistake like this.
I'm just thinking back on my career, which has been full of bugs of all magnitudes. If I categorise my past bugs, there are many common patterns. Famous old-timers have names, like buffer overflows or memory leaks etc etc. Just not having the possibility to make those errors is such a freeing experience.
Also what's the big problem with no independent standardisation?
I think with the types of errors you mentioned, that part of it definitely is ecosystem. Look at OpenBSD, for example. They've built things like a safer malloc and fairly extensive patches to gcc that have caught a lot of errors and bugs. I think C/C++ can definitely get safer without changing that much, the ecosystem just needs to get a bit angrier about warnings, etc.
Standardization, and multiple implementations, means you can have multiple sets of compiler eyeballs looking over things. The zcoin bug, for example, emits a warning with the default settings of clang, but doesn't emit a peep with the default settings of gcc. For someone working with a lot of embedded code, it also means that there's a better chance that there's an implementation of the language ready to go when you need to move to a different platform.
This case specifically, a lot of the issues that allowed this to happen were logic errors which would have been valid in most languages. A functional language would not have helped very much here.
C and C++ are still used because they work, and have huge ecosystems around them. There's a lot of tooling around them, the compilers build fast, code, and are available for pretty much every planet under the sun. This particular case, it would have helped a lot if the developers looked at the warnings of the questionable code they had made, but they seem to be of the "it compiles, ship it" type that would have let those things fly regardless of the language.