At some level you could say there is a connection. In the 90s one thought garbage collectors would solve all memory problems. With modern languages we have seen some regression towards memory management which is closer to manual memory management.

Sure a language like Go does not require explicit freeing of memory, but you still think more about memory layout and pointers which is something Java tried to do away with completely. In a philosophical sense I guess you could say Rust is memory management at compilation time rather than runtime. Whatever you call it, one could say it is in that same spirit of Go, Julia, Swift etc which try to pick up some of the older more direct ways of managing memory. If we include memory layout as part of handling memory.

But I agree the sentence makes it sound like Rust has a garbage collector. The point was that some languages like Rust have gone all the way and ditched the GC all together. While others have simple made very simple collectors which rely more on programmer choices about memory use and layout.