The comment is inflammatory and over-the-top, but I can definitely relate to the sentiment and comparison with fascism. For the software industry, "memory safety" is the new form of authoritarianism in disguise. No more jailbreaking, rooting, or running what you want on hardware you rightfully "bought". All in the name of "safety and security". They want to proclaim everything else to be "unsafe" to further their goals of total control.
As the infamous quote says, "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
IMO a secure system with a developer mode switch is a better tradeoff than "please don't fix bugs because I need them to jailbreak". Unfortunately almost everybody is leaving out the developer mode switch.
Memory safety system programming languages exist since early 1960's and already by 1980 it was known that UNIX and C were a disservice to mankind, sadly profit and free beer OS was more appealing than security.
The only thing we are giving up is cowboy programming.
Isn't the authoritarianism in the fact that the hardware you buy doesn't let you just install your own firmware?
"Memory safety" has the word "safety" in it, but really it's just a tool to help developers avoid bugs. I want to be able to install whatever I like on my hardware, but I certainly don't want other people to be able to install whatever they want on my hardware.
Let me rephrase your comment:
“Saving people from suicides is come kind of fascism and authoritarianism - no more freedom to make decisions related to your own life.”
As the infamous quote says, "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."