Whether pointers exist is irrelevant. What matters is if they're exposed to the programmer. And even then it mostly only matters if they're mutable or if you have to free them manually.
Sure, IORef is a thing, but it's hardly comparable to the prevalence of pointers in C. I use pointers constantly. I don't think I've ever used an IORef.
If you have an array and an index, you have all the complexity of pointers. The only difference is that Haskell will bounds check every array access, which is also a debug option for pointer deref.
Hard to believe that “learners ... get confused over mutability” more than functional programming when millions of middle-schoolers grokked the idea of “mutability” in the form of variables in Basic, while I (and at a guess, at least thousands of other experienced programmers) have no fucking idea about pretty much all the stuff in most of the tens or hundreds of articles and discussions like this that we've seen over the years. Just plain stating that “mutability is more difficult” without a shred of evidence ain't gonna fly.
Sure, IORef is a thing, but it's hardly comparable to the prevalence of pointers in C. I use pointers constantly. I don't think I've ever used an IORef.