RAII is great (especially as a developer’s aid), but I don’t think it’s had a huge effect on memory unsafety: it’s still very easy to UAF in a RAII-only codebase, thanks to all of the flexibility C++ allows in constructors and destructors (and unintuitive behavior in moved-out-of objects).

Rust is generally perceived as having many of the same developer kindnesses as C++, while having same-class performance. Learning it has a bit of a curve, but I found that it eventually clicked (I have a C and C++ professional background).