The cost of surface level rewrites has crashed. Which will probably cover 80% of cases. Caveat emptor on which side your project falls.

I have no issues recognizing that I had memory-related problems in production (I program embedded systems in C).

But most of my issues were related to concurrency and data sanification, especially when the other end of communication fails with unexpected behavior. These bugs are nastier than memory.

So, I have pointers, and I am not afraid to use them.