The ONLY reason to reference count is when you need GC-like behavior on a few objects, but do not want to impose a GC on all objects. It is a very valuable tool in performance code not because it is fast, but because it allows you to make other things fast. Suggesting that you should reference count the world is patently ridiculous. This is the reason for Rust's Arc and C++ shared_ptr, not that they are faster than a GC.

The blog post completely brushes aside the costs of _atomic_ counter increments and decrements, calling them "just increments." The "atomic" is the key performance problem, not the increment.

Reference counting also makes objects larger so small objects cannot fit inside a machine register.

Modern GC algorithms are very efficient. They do not need to pause the world, and they do not need to be jittery. However, someone who doesn't understand how expensive atomic ops are probably wouldn't understand this either.