> I can only assume that the bug classes you are referring to would have been eliminated by using essentially any language with a type system.
Rust has a very expressive type system[0], which you won't otherwise find before hitting the more functional and research-y side of things. Modelling data in terms of enums (sum types), move types (affine types), etc... makes it a lot more reliable and a lot less faillible as it just removes entire swathes of edge cases. See concepts like "making invalid states unrepresentable".
[0] though it's still lacking in many ways, the more you get the more you want after all
Other than Rust the only other "pragmatic" language I can think of that has as much of a robust type system is Typescript. As you say anything else you'd have a hard time convincing the rest of your team to use.
Typescripts type system is anything but robust. It's escape hatch build upon escape hatch. Don't get me wrong, it has to be like that due to it allowing gradual typing and essentially beeing a superset of js.
Rust has a very expressive type system[0], which you won't otherwise find before hitting the more functional and research-y side of things. Modelling data in terms of enums (sum types), move types (affine types), etc... makes it a lot more reliable and a lot less faillible as it just removes entire swathes of edge cases. See concepts like "making invalid states unrepresentable".
[0] though it's still lacking in many ways, the more you get the more you want after all