Depends on the GC implementation, not all of them "eat your memory, trash caches, and slow everything down" the same way.

And even those that do, if they do it within the time and memory budget bounds for the task goals, then that is still a win.

I don't care that manually managed memory would solve the task with 10ms and 20KB, the GC with 100ms and 200KB, if my budget is 1s and 1MB.