That's an interesting point of view. I really don't buy that garbage collection has advantages for the user. Sure it has advantages for the developer of the language, like a GIL, but for the user, it's more a constraint they have to live with.
Then some Java, a lot of Ruby, JS, Python. Manual memory management for this kind of applications is unnecessary optimization. If there is memory pressure on servers there are cheaper ways to remove it than the developer time to manually manage memory.
Leave C for the kernel stuff, and use Perl and similar languages as much as possible for userspace.
Unfortunelly it doesn't help that many of them lack any kind of compilation, dynamic or static, thus making many reach out to C and derived languages.
For me the ideal UNIX is something like Inferno/Limbo, Android,....
Worst case scenario Java without value types - Rewrite it in another language.
"Yes I could do without this tool, using my bare hands... But I created this tool and now it's easier and I'm faster at iterating. And since it is easier the production cost decreases. Which means I could charge less while retaining the same margin. "