I don't think this is the crux of the matter. Programming newbies are not scared of C/C++ because of std::unique_ptr<T>. They are scared of three-star programmers, of intrusive lists, of clever packed data structures - in short, of pointer arithmetic. Java, Python and JavaScript don't allow that, so it's hard to compare them (that's why we distinguish between "pointer" and "reference", even though in practice they are exactly the same thing under the hood, of course).