Honestly what I mostly want is to not have memory leaks. Which somehow stopped being a focus at some point

The "good" news is that Bjarne Stroustrup is right there with you, Bjarne sees eliminating all memory leaks as a high priority for C++ and one of his main goals.

The bad news ought to be obvious, this "goal" is not achievable, it's a fantasy that somehow we should be able to see the future, divine that some value stored won't be needed in the future and thus we don't need to store it. Goals like "We shouldn't store things we can't even refer to" are already solved in languages used today, so a goal to "not have memory leaks" refers only to that unachievable fantasy.

Because we have so much memory no one cares if it leaks. <_<

This is harder than it looks as soon as you start counting abandoned memory (stuff that's still referenced but not actually used.)