Best way to create player inventories

Hi, so Im at a bit of a dilema here and I figured I'd help way out the pros and cons of this new inventory system I had in mind. Instead of converting the data from a game object to an inventory object I figure what if I never deleted the game object but just disabled and enabled their functions? If you read data from a chest usually it takes some time to process the information with each inventory opened, but the pros of that is it could all be drawn from a list of strings which are really easy to write.

On the other hand, what if no objects actually despawned in the game? Would that be better or a nightmare? I don't know how much resources they take really so I would love to get some advice on your approaches to inventory,

Cheers,
Pete.