> Safe rust prevents all those memory bugs, instead causing a panic.

Rust is even stronger than that, in the vast majority of cases, panics are not related to memory bugs as those are caught at compile time in Rust (panics are usually the quick and dirty way to deal with invalid files names and such things, as Rust refuses to accept those silently).

> panics are usually the quick and dirty way to deal with invalid files names and such things, as Rust refuses to accept those silently

And if you were writing quick and dirty C those would likely be memory bugs instead.

In C the program implicitly assumes there won't be an invalid file name or such thing. If the assumption turns out to be wrong, something unexpected (which may or may not be a memory bug) happens.

In Rust the program explicitly expects there to be an invalid file name or such thing and explicitly panics. This is both safer and more deterministic than C. Additionally, it's easy to grep for things like `panic!`, `unwrap`, `expect`, `unimplemented!`, `todo!`, etc. in your own code or your dependencies' code (assuming you have access to the source). Panicking code also tends to stand out like a sore tooth during code review.

Finally, Rust's approach slightly decreases the odds that someone will be sloppy in the first place. Since you have to explicitly acknowledge the issue and handle it (even if simply by saying `.unwrap()`), there's a chance you'll decide to just handle it properly even though you wouldn't have bothered in C. This is especially the case if you could've handled it properly by shortening `unwrap()` to `?`.