The topic has been debated for decades. It's your opinion but it's pretty reductionist and basically religious one at this point. All memory management has costs, both at compile time, run time, and cognitive overhead. You can move costs around, reduce them, and avoid some, but you'll never get away from it.

> it feels wrong to make a mess and have some else clean it up inefficiently at some point later.

Yet no one argues for manual register allocation anymore and will gleefully use dozens or even hundreds of locals and then thousands of functions, just trusting the compiler to sort it all out.

We make progress by making the machines implement our nice abstractions.