Somewhat. The issue isn't memory leaks themselves so much as learning project architecture, patterns, and generally how to do things without shooting yourself in the foot.

Rust has plenty of gotchas and unintuitive elements, so they're not too different in that sense. Though Rust is more likely to point out when you've done something wrong, where as C will exercise your debugging skills.

Modern C++ is also an option, and surprisingly easy to use. The only catch is that the errors can be very difficult to parse and it's hard to find modern best-practice materials to learn from since most of industry is quite far behind compared to where the language is.

One benefit Rust has is that it's quite new and niche, so the materials tend to be of fresh, without much legacy mindset, and of a relatively high quality. Tbh I'm not sure how Rust is for newbies, but it may be worth a shot. At the very least, the community is passionate and the errors will be readable...