As I remember, Cell only allows moving/copying data from/to cell so if you have a 128-byte object inside do you have to copy it to modify? Or this can be optimized?
RefCell does do runtime checks, but the cost is checking the counter, a conditional branch, then incrementing/decrementing the counter twice.
Because the counter is non-atomic and non-volatile the optimiser can sometimes optimise out the actual modification of the counter. It's not free, but it's not also not a huge expense.