It's much more than just null pointer dereferencing. Time and time again, it's been proven that Rust protects even very experienced C++ programmers from bugs they didn't realize they're even making.

This is a good point. Personal assurances count for little. No-one is above writing buggy code. Even C/C++ codebases written by very expert programmers, often have pointer-based bugs, especially if large and complex. Operating systems and drivers, for instance.

As well as having free-form pointers, C/C++ also have many, many dark corners.

What proportion of C++ programmers know that comparison = (c == c++); causes undefined behaviour?