I thought about this for a bit, because at first I thought you were making up a rather insulting caricature that could only detract from your case, or at least from anyone wanting to engage with you. I've been in C++ game dev for something like 25 years, and I'm sure I have never encountered a programmer who acted like using pointers was any more impressive than using the alphabet. That goes for any daily-use language feature not including all the optional C++ esoterica. We don't even talk about using pointers, we just use them. We no kidding talk more about how to use curly braces than how to use pointers. But then it occurred to me that perhaps that's only true amongst ourselves, where we don't have as much to feel defensive about. It's just silently understood that pointers are basic. But maybe if a C++ programmer were talking to a Rust programmer or any other language with a higher level memory paradigm, and if it was a conversation about whose language was best for what, then maybe they would feel defensive and need to act a bit superior.

Or, perhaps when you say they act big about using pointers, do you mean that they act big about using pointers safely? Because that is different. That's a conversation I began declining to have because I no longer believe it's possible for a person who is trying to use C++ for a task, and has already decided it is the best available tool for that task, to have that conversation with pretty much anybody without it devolving into a pissing match.