Just a personal anecdote, but it regularly makes a substantial (like 2x+) difference for me in tight linear algebra loops. It seems to be required if you want to coax clang to emit vfmad instructions for common C linear algebra idioms. Narrow use case, I know, but it can definitely make a big difference in some domains.

It certainly does... it's the main reason fortran was often faster than C, isn't it? Aliasing prevents automatic vectorization, among other things.

Whether or not the compiler will be smart enough to autovectorize is a different question.