Sure. GC makes some particular operations faster at the expense of adding overhead in a few other places (thrashing the caches by scanning the heap, using precious memory bandwidth to move stuff around, pausing threads of the app from time to time). However, from the developer and end-user perspective it does not matter that allocation is a pointer-bump and deallocation is a no-op. What matters is the performance of all the things together.

If there is a performance problem caused by heap allocation, I find it much easier to locate it in a traditional program using manual memory management under-the hood, than in a managed app with tracing GC. This is because the cost is directly associated with the code doing the allocations / deallocations. In managed app, the cost is spread out through unrelated code.