I think "good but not perfect" describes my experience here as well. I've certainly needed to rework some bits of code that were allocating when I didn't expect them to, but so far, this has not become too onerous (yet).

The "write a little bit of code, then test it to see if it allocates" approach has been very useful. That way I don't get too far out on a limb with a bunch of allocating code and no easy way to clean things up.