Adding that with a principled approach, I don't even see much of an issue with doing manual creates and deletes in a object-graph type app, with many unstructured lifetimes. Sometimes that might just be required, and then the complexity is just there either way. Having to cleanups manually or not doesn't change anything about that. It's a bit more cumbersome to get everything right when doing it manually -- sure.

The problem is mostly people graduating from school thinking that somehow there is only stack and heap, and malloc/free is how you do heap. That view completely ignores that the essence of programming systems is mostly to understand the machine, and then doing conceptual and architectural work on a solution (and also on a problem). The act of writing actual code is then mostly just translating those concepts into the digital world verbatim.