It is deterministic wrt. the object lifetime which is exactly what you need if your "delete" is actually controlling access to some shared resource that must be

It is deterministic wrt. the object lifetime which is exactly what you need if your "delete" is actually controlling access to some shared resource that must be freed promptly when it goes out of use. The drawbacks you mentioned are largely-unavoidable consequences of that requirement, and they mostly matter when the allocation graph is large and complex. It's why obligate RC as found in Swift is likely a bad idea, and even inferior to obligate tracing GC - but other languages can do better than that, e.g. introducing arenas that can be used to allocate or free objects as a group, in a single operation.