Pascal's low-level semantics are comparable to C's. That's why I dispute that it doesn't have the same traps.

I agree that if you program C by emulating higher-level object systems, it becomes unmanageable and a lot of bugs around object lifetimes appear, and they're very hard to fix.

I personally don't have a great interest in such object systems, but fail to see how C++ should be any worse than Pascal in terms of perceived safety resulting from the higher level of abstraction.