Leaving aside the hyperbolic fringe, I'd guess that what you've heard is that it's possible for a team with discipline and experience to develop in such a way that they sidestep C++'s memory pitfalls. The situation being discussed here is the exact opposite.

For example, while I'm not particularly fond of Python as an engineering language, I've never worked on a team with poor enough process that we deal with (eg) production runtime failures due to typo-ed variable names that would have been caught by the compiler. And yet I'd never claim that it's impossible for such a problem to exist, given arbitrary levels of talent composed in arbitrary teams and processes.