Engineering is about tradeoffs.

When I write in Rust, the process uses very little RAM. BUT, I often spend a lot of time working through ownership issues and other syntax sugar to prove that memory is cleaned up correctly.

When I write in garbage collected languages, I can move a lot faster. Yes, the process uses more RAM, but I can finish a lot more quickly. Depending on the program that I'm writing, finishing quickly may be more important than using as little RAM as possible.

Furthermore, "which is better" isn't always clear. If you're relying on reference counting (smart pointers; or ARC or RC in Rust), you could actually spend more CPU cycles maintaining the count than an optimized garbage collector will spend finding free memory.

(IE, you spend a lot of time working in a RAM efficient language only to end up with a program that trades off RAM efficiency for CPU efficiency. Or even worse, you might miss your window for building a prototype or testing a feature because you became obsessed with a metric that just doesn't matter.)

These are very critical tradeoffs to understand when you make statements like "Garbage collection is and always was an evolutionary dead end," "it feels wrong to make a mess and have some else clean it up inefficiently at some point later," and "hidden runtime cost".

(Remember, sometimes maintaining a reference count uses more CPU than an optimized garbage collector.)