[crispweed]

The text I quoted seemed to suggest that the reference going out of scope could trigger deallocation.

[Manishearth]

Which is true.

The word "reference" is overloaded, it can be used to mean "anything pointery that's guaranteed to exist" too. Box<T> in this context is a reference.

The post does kind of dance between definitions of "reference" a bit, but I think that's intentional.