Anecdotally for me, I spent more time in my first 0.5 years of Java tuning GC and debugging GC issues, than I spent chasing memory leaks in my previous 5 years of C++. The worst part is that you quickly learn to not introduce too many memory leaks, but as far as GC tuning goes the skill-set feels more like voodoo then science and is constantly obsoleted by GC code changes (or wholesale replacement).

I can see how this could be true in some cases and especially for throw-away code and when perf doesn't matter, but for anything at scale and/or with perf requirements, GC is terrible and wastes tons of developer time fighting it (debugging, tuning semi-opaque configs) and working around it (object pools, off-heap buffer managers, controlling object lifetime to avoid certain characteristics, controlling object size, etc.)