Arenas are fantastic when they work; when they don't, you're in a place that's neither simple nor particularly efficient.

Generational tracing garbage collectors automatically work in a manner similar to arenas (sometimes worse; sometimes better) in the young-gen, but they also automatically promote the non-arena-friendly objects to the old-gen. Modern GCs - which are constantly evolving at a pretty fast pace - use algorithms that reprensent a lot of expertise gathered in the memory management space that's hard to beat unless arenas fully solve your needs.

For a lot of everyday programming arenas are "all you need".