I would say no. To have stellar performance, you'll need compaction, you'll need parallelism (of GC threads), and you'll need concurrency between the GC threads and mutator threads; and for good throughput/footprint tradeoff you'll need generational collection. True, you might not need to contend with allocation rates that are that high, but getting, say, concurrent compaction (as in ZGC) and/or partial collections (as in G1), requires a sophisticated GC. E.g. Go isn't as pointer-heavy as (pre-Valhalla) Java, and its GC is simple and offers very good latency, but it doesn't compact and it throttles, leading to lower throughput (I mean total program sluggishness) than you'd see in Java, even with a much higher allocation rate. The thing is that even with a low allocation rate, you'd get some challenging heaps, only later, say, every 10 seconds instead of every 5.

It's true that a simpler GC might get you acceptable performance for your requirements if your allocation rate is relatively low, but you still won't get OpenJDK performance. So I'd say that if you design your language to require fewer objects, then you can get by with a simple GC if your performance requirements aren't too demanding.

All that dereferencing puts a higher load on data structure traversal (which is why Java is getting "flattenable" types) than on the GC. The main reason for Java's particular GC challenges isn't its pointer-heavy (pre-Valhalla) design but the mere fact that it is the GCed platform that sees the heaviest workloads and most challenging requirements by far. Java's GC needs to work hard mostly for the simple reason that Java is asked to do a lot (and the better some automated mechanism works, the more people push it).