Sure, but now you're essentially in the same business as someone using a GC finds themselves where they are tuning the GC, using object pools, etc.

> There's no actual reason that the full deallocation needs to happen immediately in all reference counting implementations. If you have hard time or latency constraints you could queue up the actual dereferencing and ensure that you only dereference a certain number of objects per time period.

Yup, that's a common optimization. But now you have given up the property that destruction happens immediately and deterministically.

My overall point is that the benefits of ref counting are not without cost. There are trade-offs and as you make different ones to improve performance or latency, you quickly discover that your ref counting system starts to take on shades of tracing GC with both the benefits and downsides that that entails.