Leaving aside the hyperbolic fringe, I'd guess that what you've heard is that it's possible for a team with discipline and experience to develop in such a way that they sidestep C++'s memory pitfalls. The situation being discussed here is the exact opposite.
For example, while I'm not particularly fond of Python as an engineering language, I've never worked on a team with poor enough process that we deal with (eg) production runtime failures due to typo-ed variable names that would have been caught by the compiler. And yet I'd never claim that it's impossible for such a problem to exist, given arbitrary levels of talent composed in arbitrary teams and processes.
For example, while I'm not particularly fond of Python as an engineering language, I've never worked on a team with poor enough process that we deal with (eg) production runtime failures due to typo-ed variable names that would have been caught by the compiler. And yet I'd never claim that it's impossible for such a problem to exist, given arbitrary levels of talent composed in arbitrary teams and processes.