[NBJack]

Unity aside, I believe it's useful in a lot of areas of gamedev.

Anecdotally, in a lower-level game engine I wrote at one point in C#, object pooling significantly reduced memory overhead (and IIRC increased framerates on complex scenes) when I scaled well past 1000 dynamic, moderately-lived entities. Particles, objects, projectiles, bad guys, etc. I believe can all benefit from pooling, assuming they aren't long-lived.

I do agree it can be error prone, but I'm convinced it's worth it for several places in gaming.