[planede]

My take on this is that code should always match up malloc and free, but your application may use an allocator where free is noop, if that's appropriate for the application you write. This way your code is more generic and can be reused in an other application with different constraints.

And as soon as you are replacing free, you can replace malloc as well to be optimized for your use case. No need to build difficult bookkeeping hierarchies when they will never get used.