Yes, ARC is technically a form of automatic memory management but suffers from the drawback that it is unable to deal automatically with cyclic references. You therefore have to deal with these manually using weak references which is not always straightforward.
However, I believe JetBrains have already said that they’re building their own ‘native friendly’ GC for Kotlin Native. I don’t know whether this means that you’ll be able to suspend the GC when executing a critical piece of code, optionally use manual memory management or both. We’ll just have to wait and see.