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> more predictable runtime performance

Not really, reference counting can cause a single object deallocation to trigger an arbitrarily long chain of deallocations.

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Yes but then you can move your deallocation out of the critical path

Variable time yes but you know when you're going to pay it

(I mean yes you can put your gc.run() there as well, but it might not give you the results you want)

Immediate reclamation, yes. There do exist a number of reference-allocation algorithms that performs deferred reclamation similar to how tracing GC does.

Yes, but that still leaves the circular dependency problem.

And tbh I don't think I ever saw a circular dependency in a system

I'm not saying they don't exist of course (or that GC/RC shouldn't cater for them) but it's a very specific use case

A doubly linked list already creates a circular dependency.

True (especially if it's a circular one) but those can be weakrefs/softrefs

There do exist algorithms for resolving them, and that process can too be deferred, but also restricted to subgraphs and only when cycles are possible.

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