Casey Muratori and Jon Blow have pushed this concept frequently.
They largely don't deeply elaborate, which is sad because I am a professional game developer who is interested in precisely presented knowledge so I can apply it to my work.
My interpretation is that games want to allocate large pools of resources, like GPU buffers, cpu memory, etc, and reuse that memory over and over. Ie: Reinitialize it.
In my experience, RAII is my preferred pattern for certain things (std::lock_guard), and you can almost certainly express the majority of these "uber game dev patterns" using RAII/smart pointers/etc, but the c++ implementation of these "uber game dev patterns" tends to be more complicated (and imo esthetically ugly) compared to really well written C.
These new languages (zig, odin, jai) appear to be attempts to improve C to allow an alternative to C++ that doesn't have the ugly baggage that C++ has.