This kinda counter-resonates with me. I'm not a superb programmer by any means, but C's memory management rarely caused me bad problems. I find it much easier to deal with than the complexity of languages like C++ and Rust.
Calling malloc isn't even manual memory management to me, it's just calling malloc. Writing malloc (not that hard in general! but tricky to get exactly the allocator performance or security properties you want for your use case) is manual memory management.
> In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage.
So, you can call it however you like, but calling `malloc()`/`free()` manually (emphasis on the `free()`, since allocation is explicit in most languages in form of `new` or something) is manual memory management, and this is how most programmers use this term.