The semantics of the english here is a little lacking, but I think strictly conforming C code has pointers that behave like references. To my current understand

The semantics of the english here is a little lacking, but I think strictly conforming C code has pointers that behave like references. To my current understanding, this is highly unrealistic, hence ameliorating tooling like address sanitization. To be clear, they would still be called pointers. But when people talk about the complications of pointers, they are referring to non-standard behavior which is necessary with today's C code (and pretty much all historic C code).