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This is what happens when your phone and all it's apps are written in a garbage collected language.

That’s a gross misrepresentation, and far from the whole truth. (Besides, ref counting is also a garbage collection algorithm)

A huge chunk of the OS runs native stuff. Add to it that android is less strict at putting apps/processes to sleep, it’s become a much less black and white question.

You are missing the point here – garbage collected languages (the "allocate it and forget about it" style, not refcounting like Objective-C) require much more memory to perform at the same level as a language where memory is explicitly allocated and deallocated.

Yes, I’m fairly familiar with garbage collectors and these are called tracing GCs. My point is that a big chunk of the system doesn’t use these, so you can’t just put the blame on one thing.

Would one percent be responsible for a system’s bad performance if that is “slow”?

Yep. I still use the iphone 7+ as a backup phone, it still gets security updates and runs modern apps fine with 3GB! Slow compared to modern phones, but that's not down to the RAM, the memory management is amazing, never had an issue.

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