In this sort of question context is everything. Personally I can't stand leaks, and in my code I go to great lengths to fix them if they crop up, but it is not always worth it to fix a leak, and when people are paying me by the hour I have on occasion told them it was not worth my fee for me to fix a leak in their code. Let me give you an example:
I was triaging a project, doing some perf work and fixing a lot of bugs. There was a leak during the applications initialization that I tracked down, and fully understood. Fixing it properly would have required a day or so refactoring a piece of otherwise functional code. I could have done something hacky (like stuffing the value into a global and grabbing it some point I know it was no longer in use to free), but that would have just caused more confusion to the next guy who had to touch the code.
Personally I would not have written the code that way in the first place, but most of us don't get to always work on pristine well designed codebases, and sometimes you have to look at these things pragmatically. The amount of time it would have taken me to fix that 150 byte leak could instead be spent making algorithmic improvements that shaved off megabytes of ram.
Ultimately, I decided that leaking 150 bytes for an app that used around a gig of ram and ran on a dedicated machine was not worth fixing it, so I wrote a comment saying that it was leaked, what needed to be changed in order to fix it, and why it was not worth it at the time.
