That's because, unlike Rust, those languages with RC would have a lot of unnecessarily refcounted objects because they don't have value objects, do a whole lot of useless reference count updates because they don't have borrowing and always have to use atomics because they can't ensure that some objects are not shared between threads (and also would need a cycle collector in addition to the reference counting).

If you use reference counting properly in a well-designed language then it's obviously better than GC since it's rarely used, fast, simple, local and needs no arbitrary heuristics.

The destructor cascades are only a problem for latency and potential stack overflow and can be solved by having custom destructors for recursive structures that queue nodes for destruction, or using arena allocators if applicable.