At least in C you know that strings are garbage, and you never pretend for a second that everything will be fine. C++ will claim "oh ho ho, we have a string type, don't worry!" and then people will get burned.
If you read the discussion, you would that people are getting burned by converting all the time between char* and std::string, because Google isn't using the same string types across all APIs.
I rather have secure strings, even if every now and then they require some attention to.
It is worse than that, because the other alternative systems programming languages that eventually lost to C and C++ also had their string type.
Just C did not, and C++ followed along due to its compatibility story.