Not true. Whole classes of bugs are just eliminated - most importantly NPEs. I’ve seen tiny scripts in node that crash due to lack of an exception handler, and I’ve witnessed countless runtime errors in Java in the simplest of web services.

I've written utility programs that never bother to deallocate memory because the program needs all of it until the point where it exits anyhow.

You can do the same in Rust with Box::leak, which takes an owned pointer and gives you back a 'static borrow. The only caveat is that unless you reconstitute the type its Drop impl won't be called, but that's likely exactly what you wanted.