I sometimes dream of a GCed language with a non-escaping pointer type. However to make it really useful (i.e. let you put it inside other non-escaping structs) you need something on the scale of the Rust borrow checker, which means adding a lot of complexity.
Which is why several GC languages (the CS meaning of GC), are rather going down the path to keeping their approach to automatic resource management, plus type systems improvements for low level high performance code when needed.
So you only go down into the complexity of affine types, linear types, effects, formal proofs, dependent types, if really needed, after spending time reasoning with a profiler.
Now, this does not need to be so complex, since languages like Interlisp-D and Cedar at Xerox, that many GC languages have offered value types and explicit stack allocation.
That alone is already good enough for most scenarios, provided people actually spend some time thinking about how to design their data structures instead of placing everything into the heap.
