I can't speak for the grandparent, but for my part I agree with your point that allocation patterns matter and that there is no silver bullet to memory management, which is exactly the reason that GC'd languages like Go are uninteresting as systems languages. Why use a language where you have to work around one of its main features when you care about performance?

I find Rust's approach much more interesting, because GC is entirely optional, but it provides abstractions that make it easier to write clear and correct manual memory management schemes.