You said it yourself:

While I preferred avoiding dynamically allocating memory, as it was much less risky, there were certainly times it just made sense or was the only way.

This is not a common attitude to have outside of embedded and similar areas. Most programmers dynamically allocate memory without a second thought and not as a last resort. Python is one of the most popular programming languages, but how often do you see Python code that is capable of running without allocating memory at runtime?