FP dependence on GC is 100% cultural. FP languages come out of academia where not depending on GC makes you unwelcome at the lunch table. (You would be suspected of being about to mention performance.)
That is absolutely not my experience with academic PL work, as someone in that field. From my perspective, it seems like we're currently undergoing a renaissance of more principled approaches to resource management than GC (especially for non-memory resources), including work on substructural type systems, dynamic resource reuse (I'm thinking of FBIP here), and new ways to combine effects and resource management.
GC makes a lot of sense if you want to provide ergonomic pure functional programming. Pure functional data structures are implemented using the idea that old versions can share nodes. With dynamic reference sharing you need something like reference counting at the least, which is a form of GC. But you probably would want something more than that since saying no to cycles would be too onerous.
No-GC could be used in cases where you are just transforming one list or whatever and you don’t need to keep around any references to older nodes. That’s an optimization which is used by a research language which focuses on effects (whatever its name was). But it does use GC (reference counting).
Then you have linear types and all of that. But the intent seems to be to want to complement regular functional programming, not to invent a new GC-less FP paradigm.
You claim that it is merely “cultural” makes it seem to me that you just want to throw some weird shade and that you don’t have any particular technical argument in mind.
