There is always a tension between making examples easily comprehensible and making them realistic. People often use references and pointers to integers as examples because they have (arguably?) the lowest conceptual overhead to distract from the point of the article. So I think you make good points, but that a more charitable reading of the examples would substitute "some type I would realistically put on the heap and make references to" everywhere you see "int".

But in general, I think some of the advantages of Rust boil down to "compiler enforcement of stuff that good practitioners of modern C++ already do". And that's a good thing.

Thanks for your links, which are great!