I think the actual problem is that std::vector is doing its own memory management under the hood, which makes it hard to control what's going on from the outside. E.g. a design flaw of the C++ stdlib, not related to RAII.
plenty of cases where this isn't the case.
-fno-exceptions just means that you want to not be able to throw for your own code.
-fno-unwind-tables / -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables makes your own code un-unwindable which is only safe if you are in entire control of the whole codebase, which is very rare in anything that is not simple games - no plug-in system, or any dynamic code loading or JIT'ing is safe as you don't know which user-provided function you call is going to throw.
Likewise, you could be in the opposite case: imagine you're making a C++ plug-in for, say, 3DS Max, where error reporting is done through exceptions ; even if your own plug-in code is built with -fno-exceptions and does not itself throw at any point, you still want exceptions that may be coming from a 3DSMax function you called to propagate to your code back to the exception handler provided by 3DS Max - and for this RAII of your own types is needed if you don't want your own resources to be leaked.
I think you really, really underestimate the amount of codebases where a large part of the code is "normal" C++ with exceptions and someone does one specific module with manual malloc / free out of cargo-culting some RAII fears.
Hell, even OP above talks about using vector along with their custom memory management scheme (which throws no matter if you use -fno-exceptions or not, as the actual "throw" call is in the precompiled libc++.so ; the code in <vector> just calls std::__throw_bad_array_new_length() indiscriminately : https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/fno8fYP7E )