"On the other hand, seeing the keywords "new" and "delete" in code is usually a bad sign." I thought those two keywords were intended to replace the basic memory allocation functions found in stdlib.h. What are the alternatives?
In C, it can be tricky to ensure that every malloc has a matching free and every fopen has a matching fclose etc. This style of resource management is error-prone, but it comes with the C territory.
Java throws its hands up in the air in disgust and basically accepts that you will generate a lot of garbage. Then it slaps a mandatory garbage collector on top to clean everything up, which I guess is an okay way to deal with memory, but it sucks for other resources that aren't managed by the garbage collector.
C++, on the other hand, makes it easy to write garbage-free code. But it's only easy if you avoid using new or similar functions that allocate resources such as file descriptors, locks, network sockets etc.
If you see people using "new", there's a good chance they're misguided C or Java programmers.
C programmers often think they should use new/delete as often as they used malloc/free in C. Java programmers sometimes try to use new every time they instantiate an object. Java did steal the new keyword from C++, and it's perfectly normal for Java code to be riddled with new's because there's no other way to do it in Java. But these styles lead to disaster in C++.