Its not at all bad (I learned programming using FreePascal, true story). But its unit system is from UCSD pascal (via TurboPascal, etc). I'd say Wirth has a certain 'signature style' and I don't think that ObjectPascal's additions really match that.
Also, IIRC, Modula-2 and Oberon feature GC, etc. and personally while I liked Pascal back then, for most stuff I do, not having a GC is pretty-much a regression.
Modula-2 doesn't have a GC, it is just like Pascal in that regard.
Modula-2+, which was developed by the same group that did Mesa/Cedar, does have GC.
However Modula-2+ was short lived and eventually grew into Modula-3, also by the same group of researchers.
As for Oberon, while it was a very nice system for 1992, it doesn't make sense in 2021, specially given its limitations for low level programming. There are a couple of ETHZ papers that talk about its GC limitations.
From the Oberon linage, Active Oberon is the best one, which adopts the same concepts as Modula-3 for low level control of the GC, with safe pointers under GC control and unsafe ones used for C like tricks like DMA transfers. This kind of language features were already present in Mesa/Cedar, but Wirth didn't want to complicate his Oberon design.
So in Oberon you are left with explicit calls to dispose resources or hope that the callbacks registered to the finallizer actually happen to run some day.
By the way, there were some Modula-2 extensions that did add support for GC, but I am not aware of any major compiler, specially given Modula-3's existence.
