[jayd16]

Ideally you would pool anything you might need to dynamically allocate during a level. You want to avoid allocations during game play entirely, if possible.

Unity itself will pool most media assets. Any given texture asset is shared between all object instances that use that texture. The programmer will end up pooling instances of their objects or just use structs and such. It can be tedious but I wouldn't call it more clunky than explicit memory management.

Large collections are actually not a problem at all in games as long as you only run the collection during a load screen.