> I believe you usually want as much control of memory management as possible as it can be a great place for finding performance improvements and also help in delivering very consistent performance.

Sure, but premature optimization is the root of all evil right? Get something functional, then make it performant by handling the problematic cases. GC doesn't prevent this progression, it's just a significant help to getting something functional.

GC can sometimes lead you into designs that can't be optimized without a change in abstraction, but it's not at all obvious that you would have landed on the right abstraction if you didn't have the GC to begin with anyway. I think getting something working as fast as possible lets you gather the data you need to make a performant design, and having to handle all of that complexity up front without a GC just delays the data gathering stage.