It's not that there's an "advantage" to pointers, but rather it's the reality that they exist. Everything you're doing in JS also "uses" pointers under the hood

It's not that there's an "advantage" to pointers, but rather it's the reality that they exist. Everything you're doing in JS also "uses" pointers under the hood, but the language and runtime abstract that away from you. C exposes you to pointers directly, so you have an opportunity to learn what they are and how they work. It's important to learn how they work, because it'll give you a better idea of what's actually happening in the higher level languages you're using. That may not be important if you stick to JS or Go, but if you'd like to learn Rust then it's impossible to accurately think through tradeoffs like whether to use Box, Rc, Arc, etc. without understanding how pointers work. In other words, I'd only recommend learning Rust if you take the time to understand pointers, and the best way to understand pointers is to write C.