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To me Garbage Collection in a language makes it easier to work with than a language without.

As an example C# (GC) and Delphi/Turbo Pascal (No GC). Was involved in two projects where the one made in C# became the successful one.

One of the absolute worst things about Delphi was the lack of GC, which took away developer time better spent elsewhere.

Yes, C# had also other benefits, but having a GC is one of the crucial features to make a language popular.

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Delphi has legendary ARC not just with its VCL and object hierarchies with TOwner model but also with its wrappers of COM's IUnknown and QueryInterfaces. Yes of course, developers can still make mistakes about sequences and memory management but a well constructed class hierarchy and discipline to manage the freeing of resources immediately after they're no longer needed is the cornerstone of basic Delphi applications.

edit: The objects that are IUnknown linked don't even need to be explicitly freed! There are several clever use cases for this for example changing TCursor from hourglass back to normal when a procedure/function is complete. It just works.

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