>My point is that memory is usually the least of one’s problem, even on average machines.

The average machine a person directly interacts with is a phone or TV at this point, both of which have major BoM restrictions and high pixel density displays. Memory is the primary determination of performance in such environments.

On desktops and servers, CPU performance is bottlenecked on memory - garbage collection isn't necessarily a problem there, but the nature of separate allocations and pointer chasing is.

On battery, garbage collection costs significant power and so it gets deferred (at least for full collections) until it's unavoidable. In practice this means that a large amount of heap space is "dead", which costs memory.

Your language sounds interesting - I've always thought that it would be cool to have a language where generational GC was exposed to the programmer. If you have a server, you can have one new generation arena per request with a write barrier for incoming references from the old generation to the new. Then you could perform young GC after every request, only paying for traversal+move of objects that survived.