There seems to be alot of work going into WASM itself, much of it is performance related:
However, the new proposal for reference types that we split off from the GC proposal tries to give a more nuanced answer to that. It introduces reference types without any functionality for allocating anything within Wasm itself. In an embedding where host references are garbage-collected that still requires a Wasm implementation to understand GC. But in other embeddings it does not need to.”