It's mostly a linguistic distinction: is your indirection a memory address, or is it relative to a data structure? You gain more than you lose in most instances by switching models away from the machine encoding - ever since CPUs became pipelined, using pointers directly has been less important than contriving the data into a carefully packed and aligned array, because when you optimize to the worst case you mostly care about the large sequential iterations. And once you have the array, the handles naturally follow.
The reason why it wouldn't come up in webdev is because you have a database to do container indirection, indexing, etc., and that is an even more powerful abstraction. The state that could make use of handles is presentational and mostly not long-lived, but could definitely appear on frontends if you're pushing at the boundaries of what could be rendered and need to drop down to a lower level method of reasoning about graphics. Many have noted a crossover between optimizing frontends and optimizing game code.
The reason why it wouldn't come up in webdev is because you have a database to do container indirection, indexing, etc., and that is an even more powerful abstraction. The state that could make use of handles is presentational and mostly not long-lived, but could definitely appear on frontends if you're pushing at the boundaries of what could be rendered and need to drop down to a lower level method of reasoning about graphics. Many have noted a crossover between optimizing frontends and optimizing game code.