Yes, of course, but the actual games are written (primarily! sometimes they will optimize something when actually necessary with a lower-level language! that's great!) in the scripting language.

The OP implies heavily that writing a program in a language with anything but pure manual memory management makes you lesser as a programmer than him: "Unfortunately, a lot of people never move past this point on their journey as a programmer" implies he has moved further on in his "journey" than those that dare to use a language with GC.

(and with respect to C++ note that OP considers RAII to be deficient in the same way as GC and ARC)