It would probably make discussion easier if people switched to using better terminology. I prefer using "destruction" to mean the memory for an object actually getting freed, and "finalization" for whatever cleanup actions an object performs at some point after it is no longer accessible. So "timely destruction" is not very important, because destruction only needs to be timely enough to avoid running out of memory. "Timely finalization" is what we spend much time talking and worrying about. In Perl5, if you didn't think about it too hard then you could get away with thinking of them as being the same thing, even though they never really were.
I guess you could think of the lifecycle of an individual object as being controlled by a few significant life events: 1. birth 2. the last reference disappearing 3. finalization 4. destruction
