Ironically, there are so many pointers at this point that OSes often now do use a single address space for every program (with escape hatches in case you need aliasing).
Virtual memory and vtables are now more about access control than about managing the scarcity of pointers.
Can you provide any citations for this (extraordinary, if true) claim? My knowledge of operating systems (which is based on experience in designing toy ones, but also studying other operating systems) suggests this is not the case on at least windows, macOS and linux. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong however!
Virtual memory and vtables are now more about access control than about managing the scarcity of pointers.