> But there is just an enormous spectrum of cases where the convenience of a garbage collector - which gives you less (but not zero) opportunities for memory leaks and speeds up development

I think the article is actually more of an argument against that line of reasoning than an argument about performance. Its main proposition is that properly used RAII gives you less opportunities for resource leaks of all sorts, and is very easy to do. I agree with you that it isn't wrong in all scenarios (I mostly program in Ruby and Javascript for goodness sake!), but I think a lot of people are unaware of some of the advances in patterns, libraries, and compilers that make it much easier to write software that doesn't need a GC.