I don't agree they are useless - they don't stop you from accessing nullptrs, but they do help manage the lifetimes of your dynamically created objects.

And I haven't seen anything indicating unique_ptr is to be deprecated - maybe you're thinking about auto_ptr.

Smart pointers are not at all useless and not at all deprecated (you are thinking of auto_ptr; there are still unique_ptr and shared_ptr).

They don't try to address the check for null problem at all; that isn't their intent. All they mean to do is eliminate several classes of common, easy to make mistakes such as not zero initializing or not freeing the resource.