The reality though it many people are not using smart pointers. I have seen many people argue they don't like them because they want to see every place delete is called. (meanwhile of course they never notice all the places it should be called but isn't - but at least where it is they see it)

Personally I love to use smart pointers where bleeding edge performance is not necessary.

If I need the absolute fastest code, then that code will be tortured under valgrind. That’s non-negotiable in my book.

Code is not done until its memory management is proven correct.

It's more than that. Smart pointer help, but there are cases where even when using smart pointers you can encounter memory safety issues. Especially when you need to interact with c or older c++ code that doesn't use smart pointers. And smart pointers don't provide any protection against data races in multi-threaded code, like rust does.