Tell me you haven't looked at Java in 15 years without telling me.

Given that the vast majority of non-GC language code does a terrible job of managing memory, it's not difficult at all for the JVM to win out on efficient, reliable systems.

To be clear, I think that GC is absolutely the right approach, you just need an object model that lets you write idiomatic code that allocates an order of magnitude or 2 less. Once Valhala is (finally) released, the Java ecosystem will start to have the tools to write efficient code (the same tools that C# has had for ~2 decades now), but until then it's just completely impossible to write object oriented code in Java without millions of allocations per second.