> explicitly rejects the smart_ptr/RAII/friends model in favor of bulk allocations, arenas, freelists, etc?

These aren't mutually exclusive; you can use the former to manage the latter, after all.

> I know there are groups of highly productive programmers that feel the traditional C++ ownership model is hot garbage

I'm not aware of links off the top of my head, but I can try to summarize the argument.

From my understanding, the argument against RAII/etc. has more to do with the mindset it supposedly encourages more than the concept itself - that RAII and friends makes it easy to think more in terms of individual objects/elements/etc. instead of batches/groups, and as a result programmers tend to follow the easy path which results in less performant/more complex code. By not providing such a feature, so the argument goes, programmers no longer have access to a feature which makes less-efficient programming patterns easy and so batched/grouped management of resources becomes more visible as an alternative.