While true, I think there's a lot of "this is better because it's been written in Rust" software around these days. The emphasis is on the language, not the problem being solved.

Agreed. Some project attract attention just because it is written in Rust. Although Rust is well-designed, the language does not make everything.

Memory leaks in rust might be less common than a fully GC'ed language but saying rust prevents or makes them less common than e.g. zig/c++ seems like a stretch.

You literally cannot get them period in rust. Like it is not possible. That's the point of rust.

Leaks are absolutely considered safe by rust. Just look at Box::leak. And if we're comparing it to GC'd "leaks", those are typically hashmaps growning out of control and that can also happen

Leaks can happen in rust. The guarantee safe rust makes is that memory leaks cannot result in undefined behavior.