Agreed, for most real world softwares, the cost of GC is irrelevant. But there are still some programs like databases or game engines where the cost can start adding up. That's when you measure and optimize.
> That's when you measure and optimize.
How do you "optimize" the GC away after you wrote your entire database server in a language that uses it?
This assumes that you’re only ever running a single software at a time. Sure, 2-10x slower/memory consumption might not matter in a vacuum, but when every software is like this, you get machines that feel slower than they did 2 decades ago.
Yet the three major game engines Unreal, Unity and Godot all have a GC on their infrastructure, and Capcom is quite happy with their .NET fork on RE Engine.
Also every single graphics application that uses Metal or DirectX, relies on reference counting as GC algorithm.