This article seems like a bit of a strawman. I don't know of anybody who complains that the cost of actually freeing memory in GC'd languages is somehow signif

This article seems like a bit of a strawman. I don't know of anybody who complains that the cost of actually freeing memory in GC'd languages is somehow significantly worse than in non-GC'd languages. Everybody is ultimately complaining about how expensive it is to figure out what is actually okay to free/release in the first place. There are plenty of GC-backed languages/runtimes where the GC penalty is isolated or mitigated because of other known constraints of the system. Erlang's no-shared-mutable-state constraints allow its GC system to avoid stopping the world and also allows processes to run on other schedulers while GC is active on a different process running on a different scheduler.