> I had an array of widgets. Those widgets had textures. Those textures were copied over and over and over again, because containers can do that, so I had to go back to rethinking the storage class for the widgets.

Actually, he didn't have to rethink it, and many people don't - instead, their code just copies things. Avoiding copying increases the chance for mishandling ownership and deleting a still-used object (or you can use shared_ptr, an then at some point the reference counting involved might get slower than the overhead of gc.) Beating gc in terms of memory footprint and speed without adding bugs is possible, but not necessarily trivial - and it's often very easy to lose to gc instead.

There are many good reasons why no language ever copied C++'s approach to "values" and "references", where every type can be passed either by value or by reference and redefine copying, assignment and now "move semantics." The proliferation of unnecessary copying is one of those reasons.