The goodies in question are local refs and ref returns, right? Which really only make a difference when you're writing memory safe code. If you're dropping down to "unsafe" and manual memory management for other things, then refs don't do anything that raw pointers don't.

There are other goodies, like memory views, blittable structs, interior pointers and readonly refs.

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/master/docs/Language%2...