When I read the article it was very clear, due to the compiler's in-memory graphs, that they needed a GC.

(IE, as opposed to reference counting, where if you have cyclic loops, you need to manually go in and "break" the loop so memory gets reclaimed.)

Go isn't that bad in terms of memory predictability to be honest. It generally has roughly 100% overhead in terms of memory usage compared to no GC. This can be reduced by using GOGC env variable, at the cost of worse performance if not careful.