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I'm with you on this. I'm an old school gamedev. Shipped games on Atari 800, C64, NES, and most system since then. I hated garbage collection for the longest time.

But, I have to acknowledge plenty of games are shipping with garbage collection. Unreal has garbage collection. Unity games have garbage collection. They seem to all be running just fine and there's plenty of large AAA games or close to AAA games made with both engines.

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They do not have garbage collection. You're conflating game development with game engine development. When a big powerful, flexible, C++ engine has been written for you, you can use C# or JavaScript or BluePrints to use the engine to make a game.

Unity has garbage collection at the userland/scripting level. This is markedly different from garbage collection at, say, the level of the objects that marshal and keep tabs on your OpenGL resources. (Not least because--though AFAIK Unity does not do this--you can stop the world for GC only at the scripting layer rather than taking out your rendering, sound output, etc. as a side effect.)

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