One thing to remember is that arrays are just pointers under the hood. Even if you don't use them directly, or are always using smart pointers like std::shared_ptr<T>, they're still there.

For example, accessing the following array:

int foo[3] = {1, 2, 3};
// foo is identical to int*, except the type contains a size
foo[1] == 2;
*(foo + 1) == 2;

Realistically in modern C++ you could likely avoid raw pointers entirely. C++ references cover a ton of the pointer use cases. I'd say the main goal is to prevent data from being copied around needlessly, since that takes more time and memory bandwidth.