That reminds me about early Fortran where everything was statically allocated including local variables and function return address. To simulate data structures one used arrays of various dimensions. Effectively array indexes where handles. This was not memory safe as there were no bounds checks. But add those when the compiler cannot eliminate them, and one gets fast and memory safe language.

Edit: that static allocation was essentially a centralized store. Everything repeats itself.

You probably mean this essay

https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html

That's the essay. I think it's interesting because he's mimicking the way I've been writing firmware. I've found most of the issues with memory safety disappear when you use static and centralized resource allocation, avoid monkeying with pointer arithmetic, and avoid making temporary copies of pointers 'for later'.