As an EC alum I can tell you that in the late 90s there was a lot of work on E to get both transparent remote objects and distributed garbage collection working. In fact, one of the first patents I remember us having approved was Arturo's garbage collector (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5991779A/en, yes same guy as the Meta whistleblower from a week or so ago) but it was still a bit wonky in practice from what I remember.