If your use case can be split into phases you can just allocate memory from an arena, copy out whatever needs to survive the phase at the end and free all the memory at once. That takes care of 90%+ of all allocations I ever need to do in my work.

For the rest you need more granular manual memory management, and defer is just a convenience in that case compared to C.

I can have graphs with pointers all over the place during the phase, I don't have to explain anything to a borrow checker, and it's safe as long as you are careful at the phase boundaries.

Note that I almost never have things that need to survive a phase boundary, so in practice the borrow checker is just a nuissance in my work.

There other use cases where this doesn't apply, so I'm not "anti borrow checker", but it's a tool, and I don't need it most of the time.