I'm not sure I would call Rust's solution "simple" either. My sense is that fine-grained, per-object, deterministic memory management simply cannot be made sim

I'm not sure I would call Rust's solution "simple" either. My sense is that fine-grained, per-object, deterministic memory management simply cannot be made simple or easy, because the very thing you're trying to do is inherently complex and difficult. I realize it doesn't provide the same level of safety guarantees that you get out of Rust, but I am very sympathetic to Zig's approach of having no implicit default allocator, so that I can instead just use something simple and easy to reason about like an arena allocator in the 90% of cases where that's good enough for my purposes.