> Might as well go back to ye olden days and put 100% of your memory in a giant preallocated block

I do that for the Playdate: statically allocate most of the large structures and tables in global variables, and don't call malloc or free after initialization is done.

I also put some things on the stack, not so much because I need to dynamically allocate or free something, often it's because I get lower access latency to the stack compared to main memory (because stack lives inside ARM's tightly coupled memory).

There are languages with first class continuations, is if every function is async and every call is await. In that context, everything can be stack allocated and every reference to stack memory stays valid always. The cost is that stack is now non-linear / not a contiguous array.