I wouldn’t put Swift in the same ‘managed garbage-collected runtime’ family as Java, C#/.NET, Go, and Javascript, so maybe they weren’t trying to do what you think.
Swift is more like a native systems programming language that makes it easy to trade performance for ergonomics (and does so by default).
Swift has always been designed with the potential for more manual memory control. Recently, non-copyable types were introduced, and non-escapable types are currently being proposed. Additionally, more ownership control features are being added. While there is still much work to be done, progress is steady.