Maybe they actually mean VM-less, which would probably imply GC-less because if you have a GC, you pretty much have a VM doing the GC (unless it's simple ref-count). For embedded, you need VM-less, I think, as VMs tend to be too heavy.

Gambit has a VM and a GC, and is still AOT-compiled to C. (The Gambit VM is an intermediate representation of Scheme code which is then compiled down to C code.)

VMs imply a non-native bytecode execution. Garbage collection doesn't require any of that.

It's just normal library code usually called by the allocator, and well-specified memory object/pointer layouts.