I'm mostly indifferent to it because it doesn't really harm readability, and it's not hard to know when to use it, but I can seem why it might be more strongly disliked. You can't entirely rely on it to know a dereference is happening because references (e.g. `int&`) aren't subject to the `->` requirement. It's also annoying if you find that you can refactor `func(T*)` to `func(T&)` and now you have to replace all `->`s with `.`s.