GC highlight time-memory tradeoff at its worst because GC-based languages typically do not allow programmer to explicitly express his memory model forcing a lot of unnecessary "garbage" to be created. In Ruby all objects that do not fit in a tagged pointer are objects. In Go and Java some types are specifically optimized for being stack-based "value" types that reduces amount of work for GC.

I personally like the "ARC" approach with ObjC and Swift where compiler statically adds and optimizes reference counting routines, promotes objects to stack when possible and requires programmer to manually resolve cyclic references (and Xcode supports nice methods to debug and visualize memory in order to detect unintentional cycles). Accidental memory cycles are rare enough and quite debuggable at a very little mental cost to mark some references as "weak" or "unowned". But the long-term performance and memory exhaustion issues caused by GCs are completely bypassed.