Traditional GC isn’t less complex to program then automatic reference counting. Traditional GC has its place in short running extension languages, but in longer running programs you run the same risk of memory leaks as automatic reference counting since you can still over-retain from a poor ownership model. What goes wrong is slightly different, but with automatic reference counting it is easier for the compiler to find and report these issues. I feel you are conflating this with no automatic memory management which would be a higher barrier. Automatic reference counting greatly simplifies inter-op with low-level code and running on specialized hardware vs Python with interop.
RC is GC, but without cleaning up cyclic references. In general, leaking memory is not a security problem (and with a good debugger it is trivial to fix), so I don’t think it is too important a property. Leaking every cyclic reference is a bit more of a problem, but it has solutions like the occasional tracing phase like with a “traditional”, mark’n’sweep GC, but at that point why not just go with them as they are much more performant?
