It's not a meme. Most code in Rust is safe code. Even safe code does not prevent memory leaks, but it makes it vastly less likely, because of the controlled memory management. For those places when unsafe code is used, the likelyhood of getting memory leaks rises obviously. But that is a controlled little space. Because its marked as unsafe code, there is a huge red flag and more eyes are on that part than usual. And in case of a memory issue, those are the places to look first, which in turn helps finding memory issues faster.

Compare this to C, where everything is unsafe, potentially millions lines of code. Versus a couple of hundreds of thousand lines of unsafe code in Rust, if any. You can declare it as meme if you like, but that doesn't change the facts.