GC might not be a productivity win for you, but for many people it definitely is.
I'm pretty sure that's true for the great majority of software developers, but of course they don't even use a non-GC language!
Part of the reason they don't is that productivity. Not that they chose it personally for that reason, but e.g. historically enterprise code moved to Java and C# for related reasons.
(I also agree there are people that are equally productive in non-GC languages, or even more - different people have different programming styles.)
I'm pretty sure that's true for the great majority of software developers, but of course they don't even use a non-GC language!
Part of the reason they don't is that productivity. Not that they chose it personally for that reason, but e.g. historically enterprise code moved to Java and C# for related reasons.
(I also agree there are people that are equally productive in non-GC languages, or even more - different people have different programming styles.)