I don’t think so. The fact that someone with extensive experience thinks modern C++ is safe because it has semaphores and mutexes and smart pointers is legitimately scary. It’s not merely wrong, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what the problem even is. It’s like an engineer designing airliners saying that they can be perfectly safe without any redundant systems because they have good wheels. That should have you backing away slowly while asking which manufacturer they work for.
I think their statement amounts to something like in line of: subset of modern C++ and feature usage patterns can be reasonably safe and I am ok with it. Nothing is ever really safe of course. One should consider trade offs of quality / safety vs costs and make their own conclusion on where to lean more and where enough is enough.
There's an argument to be made that you can write safe C++ by using the right subset of the modern language. It might even be a decent argument. But that's not the argument that was made here. They mentioned two things that have only the most tangential connection to security and that aren't even part of C++, plus one C++ feature that solves exactly one problem.
