If there's one single reason why Java killed C++ in the enterprise space, it's memory safety. (Concurrency-readiness and WORA were also important features of course.) GC was not important, other than as a means to an end of course.

What GC does in practice is open up new domains. There are object-management patterns that simply can't be written feasibly without something like a GC runtime under the hood. (Hence Greenspun's tenth rule of programming, of course.)