Naked pointers are just too stupid for modern C++ ;)

Anyone who works on real-world production software written in C++ knows for a fact that pointers are a reality.

Also, there are plenty of frameworks who employ their own memory management frameworks, and raw pointers are perfectly fine in that context. For example, Qt uses raw pointers extensively because It's object system implements an object ownership system where each object can have child and parents, and you can simply invoke deleteLater() to free the whole dependency tree when you no longer need it.