Or you know, maybe they have different view on these things.
There are good programmers out there who don't use RAII or smart pointers and think that most of this modern stuff is just added cruft for little gain.
Standard containers are nice but if performance is your problem you often need to re-implement them anyway and if it is not then maybe you could have done it in the higher level language in the first place.
Whatever float your boat (and your particular niche).
I don't see many valid reasons why you wouldn't want to use RAII patterns for any sort of resource management. I would go as far as saying that if you aren't doing so, you're probably doing it wrong. Having said that, I'd be genuinely interested to hear some resource managment sceanrios where you're better off not using RAII.
You can end up needing a lot of different RAII types, which can get a bit annoying. If you're trying to interface with anything that wasn't written with RAII in mind - e.g., any library that tries to be C-compatible - this is pretty much inevitable.
In theory, doing without is a huge problem, because you're running the risk of resource leaks and stale identifiers - but in practice, neither is a huge problem. Picking these sorts of bugs out has been pretty simple in every project I've worked on. I've had far more heartache from the bugs stemming from RAII-type mechanisms holding on to resources longer than they should, than I've had from fixing bugs caused by resource leaks or stale resource identifiers.
I've been programming in a variety of environments in exchange for money for well over a decade now, and I think I can safely say that people who learn one thing and stick to it are what is known as 'wrong.'
Whatever float your boat (and your particular niche).