It's not that people can't deal with pointers. The most common issue in C++ is how many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with common utils. Like, we use a lot of abseil utils at work that return string_views instead of new strings, and if you're directly passing that somewhere else, you easily corrupt your memory.

std::string foo = "foo";

const std::string foo2 = absl::StripAsciiWhitespace(absl::AsciiStrToUpper(foo)); // in Python: foo2 = foo.upper().strip()

std::cout << foo2; // garbage

Yeah, all technically the user's fault, but it gets pretty tiring worrying about this stuff when you're writing a high-level application and the few CPU cycles you save don't really matter. No matter how good you are, you will make mistakes, and the chance of one bug corrupting memory in your whole process increases exponentially with the LoC written. Also I have to point out the irony in a language being type-safe but not memory-safe.

Also, I didn't expect Java-looking class syntax to leave member variables uninitialized (garbage) if you don't set a default. That should at least be a compiler warning, I mean how often do you actually want that?