>It has nothing to do with the actual process by which you request and release memory. Manual memory management being faster than GC is a function of controlling memory layout, which is one of the (very) few low hanging optimization fruits that mortals like you or I can do on contemporary CPUs.

That is kind of misleading. The difference is that C and Rust support stack allocation, which is essentially an arena style allocator integrated into the language. What the fancy pointer bumping GC runtimes do, the stack does by default. The problem is that escape analysis is difficult and it is difficult to prove that an access to memory on the stack is safe without fundamentally changing the language like Rust does. It gets worse on the heap, where you can have runtime determined ownership.

C programmers like their doubly linked lists, but when you think about it, it is actually kind of a difficult problem to formalize and analyze in its full generality.