> Sure, I'm giving up a hell of a lot of performance for this safety, but it's more than worth it for my company's use case.

Surely you're not trading performance for safety, as dozens of languages are "safe" while having much higher performance over Ruby including similarly dynamic languages JavaScript and Lua, or others such as Java, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml, and so on.

There are, of course, other reasons to choose Ruby, perhaps because of Rails, large talent pool, code conciseness, etc.