I think you two are using the word "safe" differently. I agree with you that go is memory safe, but I think they mean more that business logic will do something wrong because you got an err you didn't handle, vs deferences a null or something.
golang does nothing to solve NPEs, and any line of golang can panic at anytime. At least with Java established frameworks have exception handlers at the base where relevant exceptions can be logged or handled in some other way. With golang, an error that is not handled just silently keeps the program running in corrupted state.
Working long enough with Java I saw all the problems with exceptions and NPE and can tell you that those problems are less prominent with Go.