This new approach still requires us to be mindful of our data layout. Not caring about data layout is still definitely a strength of GC and RC. I'm actually hoping to find a way to blend Nick's approach seamlessly with reference counting (preferably without risking panics or deadlocks) to get the best of both worlds, so that we can consider it for Mojo. I consider that the holy grail of memory safety, and some recent developments give me some hope for that!
(Also, I probably shouldn't mention it since it's not ready, but Nick's newest model might have found a way to solve that for separate-chaining hash maps where addresses are stable. We might be able to express that to the type system, which would be pretty cool.)