> IMHO Garbage collection is and always was an evolutionary dead end.

An evolutionary dead end that is used by probably upwards of 90% of all productively running code, and is the subject of lots of active research, as evidenced by TFA?

> No matter how nice you make it, it feels wrong to make a mess and have some else clean it up inefficiently at some point later.

> And because of that it always involves some sort of hidden runtime cost

Because of what? Your feelings?