That's fairly reasonable advice. C++ as a better C, using the STL to avoid having to reinvent data structures is a nicer language.
However, you still want to understand pointers. There's a C++ style which avoids them, but understanding pointers is critical to understanding C and C++.
The problem with this worldview is that if you don't want to reimplement data structures, you might as well stay in a modern language. Control over memory layouts (either for performance or for systems programming) is the reason to be in C/C++ in the first place.
However, you still want to understand pointers. There's a C++ style which avoids them, but understanding pointers is critical to understanding C and C++.