GC is certainly easier. However, it is important to understand the life-cycle of objects regardless. To be able to control them (if desired) is good because in many cases one would prefer to have that control instead of being forced to use garbage collector.
In an ideal world, garbage collector makes sense because we don't want to have to worry about life-cycle management when we are solving other problems. Memory management can indeed be an annoying implementation detail, but as it stands there are certainly limiting factors in hardware which are impacted by generic object-management for specific application domains.
What about smart pointers? It gives the flexibility and benefits of garbage-collection without the performance degradation. It's not a silver bullet but it helps.
What I'm getting at is, Rust is the only modern language (in vogue at the moment) that does not use garbage collection. It would be nice if more languages didn't require a garbage collector but gave the option to use one.
If there are some more of such languages please chime in and provide a link to them! :)
Alas, having no garbage collector at all is a blissful state of simplicity when performance matters. It's not very difficult to clean up one's objects manually in a well-thought-out codebase.
In an ideal world, garbage collector makes sense because we don't want to have to worry about life-cycle management when we are solving other problems. Memory management can indeed be an annoying implementation detail, but as it stands there are certainly limiting factors in hardware which are impacted by generic object-management for specific application domains.