There are definitely reasons for manual memory management to still be a thing, but if a GC disposes of memory "too soon", i.e. when there are still live references to the memory, then it is a bug in the GC or in some FFI code that didn't manage interaction with the GC correctly.

GC is generally a good thing precisely because it prevents use-after-free errors and enables programming at a higher level without worrying about memory management. There is often a performance cost to this, it's true, but for large classes of programs it's a cost that's worth paying.

If you're hitting race conditions based on when GC runs, I'm pretty sure you're doing it wrong. Java does deterministic destruction of resource-holding objects via try-with-resources, not GC.

Deterministic object disposal is quite easy to do in GC languages, provided they support higer order functions.

It is no different than imposing a programming pattern like RAII.