GC in Nim is highly configurable: you can pause GC or even delay it indefinitely. Plus there's lots of tweaks you can make to how GC treats your code using Nim's pragma system. And no, the standard library does not rely on GC like in D.
Does this mean that all of the standard library is written using manual memory management? Wouldn't this slow down its development and expose it to all the same reliability and security problems C has?
This isn't correct, it relies heavily on GC.