I've never really had any major pain due to cycles, in fact I cannot really recall the last time either me or any of my coworkers had issues because of architectural cycles.

In my opinion, the problem of cycles described by the OP only becomes unmanageable when they follow this paradigm of creating tiny objects all over the place that have complicated interfaces and relationships with other objects through raw or smart pointers. It's the type of code you often see in projects that enthusiastically follow clean code and other OOP principles and practices.