I think, the idea was along the lines of "because C++ was not memory-safe, and it has to stay compatible with how it was, there are still a lot of ways to not write memory-safely"

This makes sense, there are memory-safely features available but there are a lot of programmers that will never willingly use that features, because the olden ways are surely better

Other than that, I agree, when you're paid to fix an unfixable problem you will probably claim something like that and advocate for your solution being the only one that solves this