Absolutely! By learning to deal with pointer manipulation and memory allocation, you can learn what it is, why it is necessary and how to recognize when it is broken. One of the problems with garbage collection is that it suffers from a memory management problem at a higher level of abstraction. There was an entry in an autonomous vehicle competition a few years ago that stalled. Physical objects in the environment were represented internally as objects in the code. When the vehicle passed them, they were moved to a collection of objects that had already been identified but were out of the field of view. That collection grew unbounded even with garbage collection because every one of those objects was still referenced.