People seem to forget that all of their amazing, wonderful abstractions are, at their core, doing exactly this: opening sockets, reading from them, writing to them, etc. There is nothing new under the sun.
Some of the worst software I've ever used, and also some of the worst software I've ever seen developed, was done by novices in safe languages. You can't escape how the computer works, you can only plug your ears and yell "LALALALALA!" really loud. But that doesn't change reality. If you aren't a good developer, you won't make good software, in any language. That's not the language's fault. If you don't understand pointers, that's on you. Computers use indirection; it's a fact of the craft. It doesn't matter if your fancy runtime hides them from you, they're still in there, and you should know how they work; not only because they're simply important, but because they'll make it easier for you to reason about things when something goes wrong. Otherwise, you'll sit there helpless and come running to someone like me with screenshots of stack traces that tell you exactly what's wrong. (Yes, this happens to me all the time.)