Yes, there are ways around it, and the paper discusses one way Google addressed it. But that's not the point. It's used as just one example to illustrate why C/C++ is not ideal for working at Google's scale.
I agree there's much more to the paper, and it's well worth the read. Bounds checking, avoiding pointer arithmetic, garbage collection, and concurrency all make sense at Google's scale.
I just think the bashing was misguided in an attempt to better justify adding a subset of Ada to C
