It's not more operations, but that extra space usage can mean the difference between creating and freeing objects with bump allocation in Eden that fits in cach

It's not more operations, but that extra space usage can mean the difference between creating and freeing objects with bump allocation in Eden that fits in cache, and walking over the heap doing a full GC so you don't run out of memory. There's a very real difference between what a simplified model of time complexity says should happen, and what actually happens when the layer of abstraction underlying the ivory tower start to spring a leak.