Yes, garbage collection seems to be the only viable solution for dealing with spaghetti reference graphs in their full generality, including possible cycles. In that context it's worth trying a high-performance concurrent GC implementation such as https://github.com/chc4/samsara Samsara.

That is just using a RefCell under the hood[1] so it is effectively the same trade-offs as the RefCell example from the article.

[1]https://docs.rs/gc/0.5.0/src/gc/lib.rs.html#495-498

Nice! This seems way more appealing than every other approach I've seen in this domain.