[danuker]

> only the baggage a project needs

What projects need manual memory management? Those where the hardware costs are comparable to development/maintenance costs. That is much rarer than people think.

RAM is cheap, and few applications really need bespoke allocation. And it's not just a question of skill; even the most disciplined make mistakes. It's one of how much brainpower you want to allocate to... memory allocation.

[Xeamek]

>What projects need manual memory management

Games.

Big/specialiased games to be precise, as for smaller projects managed language offer good enough performance.

[p_l]

In practice I found C/C++ "manual memory management" fans to know surprisingly little about memory management, or even how much manual memory management costs them in performance.

High end games programming sometimes knocks the love of malloc()/free() (and naive RAII) out of them.