> that performance is worse due to the checks.
I'd argue that use cases for 'soft pointers' are about the same as that of Rust's RC, which also incurs runtime costs (very briefly - there is no magic here, neither with Rust).
> The key idea and massive difference from standard C++ is that object destruction is delayed until a "quiescient state" happens
If you're speaking about OP - clarification: it is not "object destruction" which is delayed (destructor is still called synchronously when the variable goes out of scope, so all the crazy finalize()-like problems don't occur), it is memory deallocation which is delayed (and this is generally ok as deallocation is not observable, or at least garbage-collected languages tell us so ).
> things like mutexes can only be safe
Whether C++ or Rust or whatever-else, mutexes at app-level are evil ;-) (it can lead to a very long discussion, but long story short - finally, by 2017, most of the opinion leaders started to converge to this IMO-very-obvious observation: ASYNC RULEZZ! ).
> since that allows to statically check for correctness,
The idea behind OP is to have a tool which will do the same thing (where possible, see above re. 'soft pointers' and RC). Whether such a tool materializes - is a different story, but well - first we have to agree that such a tool is a Good Thing(tm).
> have to delay freeing memory
In practice, it is never an observable problem in (Re)Actor-like contexts ((Re)Actor use cases are about highly interactive systems ranging from games to stock exchanges, where typical input is processed in milliseconds, and amount of allocated memory until the 'quiescient state' is reached, is single-digit kilos; in extreme cases, it goes up to single-digit megabytes, still nothing by modern standards).
> you are much better off using Rust
Really really depends. It is still C++, and being C++ has its own virtues (alongside with its own quirks); just two things to illustrate this point - (i) recently it was revealed that modern GPUs are designed with ISO C++ standard in mind (specifically C++, not Rust or anything else); (ii) developer availability is also a major factor for real-world projects, and so on, and so forth. In an ideal world - well, probably Rust does look as a more to-the-point language (though even with Rust I'd create an own dialect, in particular, outlawing thread sync to simplify things), but given real-world considerations - the choice is certainly not that black-and-white.