Thats fine until "that guy" grabs the raw pointer out of a smart pointer and deletes it, or c style casts an interface to his version of the interface because he wanted it to return an int instead of a double. Then either pushes straight to dev or rounds up similarly evil individuals to approve the merge. I have debugged those errors. You can talk about accountability but even if you manage to get rid of one such dev there always seem to be more. And modern C++ doesn't really have great tools for thread safety. Its easier to get right than in 98, but still not hard to get wrong.