eh, there are GC languages famous for high uptimes and deployed in places where it "basically runs forever with no intervention", so in practice with the right GC and application scope, "deferring the concern till the heat death of the universe" (or until a CVE forces a soft update) is possible.

That's exactly why I said "it is also quite likely that your program will never grow to that point". Of course you need non-trivial knowledge to determine whether your application and GC satisfy that criteria.