RAII doesn't work with a (non-refcounting) GC is the issue: when the scope ends, you've no idea how many references there are and which of these are live. With

RAII doesn't work with a (non-refcounting) GC is the issue: when the scope ends, you've no idea how many references there are and which of these are live. With static typing you could opt into affine or linear types and those could get special cased by the compiler (to ensure a single reference is possible, and trigger the drop in case of affine types), but first you do need static typing (that's not javascript), and then you need to update the entire language to correctly handle the new affine or linear behaviour. And that can lead to a lot of weird shit with languages not designed for that (especially linear typing).