Quake, back in the late 90s, would preload assets for all entities in a level at level load time explicitly to avoid stutter when the entity finally shows up and needs to make a noise or whatever.

And some games much later didn't. I recall needing to fire off a shot on each new gun I picked up in Far Cry to be sure I wouldn't get a stutter later at a more critical moment.

Frame drops that happen more than once every several seconds are definitely noticeable (and, as a sibling comment pointed out, especially so in VR). Plus, throwing away more than half your frame budget just because of GC seems unreasonable. And this isn't even considering monitors with high refresh rates, which are slowly getting more and more popular.

> When games load in assets they'll do various things like malloc huge chunks and you lose a few frames.

Streaming/Loading assets in the main render thread is a very 2005 thing to do.