It’s meant for short lived apps where you simply wouldn’t get OOM either way. I don’t know about an objective definition for what a GC is, one I quite like is “gives the illusion of infinite memory”, based on that it isn’t a GC.

But there are also conservative GCs, RCs, etc, that fail different definitions also (leaving behind circular dependencies, having false positives, in reverse order), like in case of many things in CS, there isn’t an objective definition.