Except when it is. You'd be surprised what systems programming looks like.
Reference counts are not re-used when memory is re-used. And again, even if for some reason you had a global 64bit counter that you incremented on every allocation and never decremented, and you could somehow handle a billion allocations per second, you'd have 585 years before that counter overflowed back to 0. No computer or program can run for that long.
VMAs sound expensive. Of course a 64 bit counter is going to work for moderately expensive things.
If you have a multithreaded app doing a lot of communication, that's going to be a lot of cheap allocations happening very fast.
Reducing GC and allocation overhead results in more allocations being done, and pushback against ever-expanding allocation behavior is more of a challenge. Instead of ten other things being a higher priority than judicious data architecture, it's dozens or more.
Reference counts are not re-used when memory is re-used. And again, even if for some reason you had a global 64bit counter that you incremented on every allocation and never decremented, and you could somehow handle a billion allocations per second, you'd have 585 years before that counter overflowed back to 0. No computer or program can run for that long.