I don't think it's correct making claims like "it's a toy language" and "crashes on trivial input" without actually trying it out.
You don't need an article to clone the repo, build the language in <1s and play with it.
Autofree works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB8ea8uLsM
But it's not finished yet. We saw a better performance with a GC (due to all the extra copying autofree has to do), and made it the default.
I've always been anti-GC, but V is so minimal and doesn't result in many allocations in the first place, GC works really well with it.
In the end the user will have full control over how they want to do memory management: manual, autofree, gc.