Unreal devs have Unreal C++ dialect with GC, Blueprints and soon Verve to worry about.

The times of pure manual memory management game engines, across all layers of what requires to draw a frame are long gone.

Naturally someone is going to point out some game engine using compiled C dynamic libraries for scripting, those are the exception.

GDScript in Godot doesn't use GC, it uses reference counting and doesn't "stop the world".

Other languages that bind into the engine do this too, (C++, SwiftGodot, Rust-Godot)

C# obviously does, Miguel de Icaza actually started SwiftGodot because he (ironically) ended up hating GC pauses after promoting C# for so long

Issue isn't about game devs it's about non-game devs backseat programming.

If you spend a week in these engines you're well aware of the garbage collector.

In my experience, when using Unity, I became acutely aware of creating garbage and how to avoid it. I used to see a lot of object pooling which is basically a makeshift arena allocator.

Can you explain? AFAIK Godot uses C++ under the hood which does not have garbage collection. Other languages such as C# and GDScript use bindings.