Reference counted objects have deterministic lifetimes, like Rust or C++. Garbage collected languages don't have that. Essentially a reference counter automates some* of the ideas of the borrow checker, with a runtime cost as opposed to a compile time one.

The great thing about automatic reference counting is you can elide the incrementing and decrementing a lot of the time. Stronger guarantees, such as saying "this object is single-threaded" lead to even more optimizations.