[MaxBarraclough]

> essentially models a resource or lock of some kind

I agree that proper RAII is generally the way to go. I think of ScopeExit as being for those situations where you have to deal with C-style code. One way is to wrap the C-style code in C++ and leverage C++'s RAII. The alternative is to write C-style code yourself, but you can still use ScopeExit to ensure you didn't miss any edge-cases where cleanup is necessary (multiple points of return, exceptions, etc).

In this way, ScopeExit is for 'C++ as a better C' programming.

> This case doesn't just model that you want to execute something at the end of a scope, but that you have a handle to a resource that you can std::move around and that will get destroyed at the appropriate time

This is going far further down the C++ rabbit-hole than what we started with, though. If I just want to be sure that I didn't miss any places where I need to call free (or similar) in my C-style code, ScopeExit is just the thing.