It is a stretch to claim caching is fundamentally at odds with GC. It is more correct to say that LRU breaks the generational hypothesis, because it prioritizes new entries which take a long time to be evicted. However many workloads are frequency biased and these one-hit wonders degrade the hit rate. That is why you'll see more aggressive eviction in a modern policy, so you'll have better GC behavior and higher hit rates using something like Java's Caffeine library.