Well, he only mentions how these things make his life difficult, not how they make it easier. When you consider something, you must also consider the alternatives: a GC does insert safepoints on the one hand, but it makes lock-free data structures possible (or much, much easier) on the other. The JIT counters introduce contention before optimization kicks in, but then you get virtual method inlining, the mother of all optimizations, which you can't do without a JIT, certainly not when you want to support hot code loading.

Those things are necessary for the class of programs Java SE is meant to support (long running, high-performance server-side applications); they're not ideal for device drivers, command line programs or fast-loading GUI apps, which Rust is designed to handle. Everything is a tradeoff.