I think the response to that would be: yes but the game would simply not have been made if it wasn't written in C++. That's not to say you couldn't or that you can't make something like GTA:SA in Rust in 2025 or in a safer different language in the early 2000s. It just would take a great deal more time and expense as you'd have needed to construct a lot of tooling and do a lot of training to ensure all of the employees were up to speed before getting started. C++ was, and I think to some extent still is, the lingua franca of the gaming industry - there are some fun exceptions (Naughty Dog implementing much of Crash Bandicoot in a home-grown LISP, and presumably dozens or hundreds of DSLs and other little bespoke scripting languages in use at other studios).

And that's not to mention the uncomfortable truth that while doing this correctly in something like Rust may very well take less effort overall than in C++, that is not the bar we are aiming to clear. They wanted to implement something that was correct-enough, and given that this bug wasn't hit for 20+ years and that the game was a roaring success on all the major platforms - I think that was the right decision.