[kllrnohj]

> there are tons of ways of doing reference counting in C++

There are but critically there are also a lot of ways to not do ref counting at all. C++ isn't a refcounted language, it's a language where you can use refcounting (shared_ptr), but you don't have to (unique_ptr, value types). It's not even recommended to be primarily refcounted.

They chose a really odd subset of C++ to use here (shared_ptr exclusively), very unorthodox and not something I've ever seen elsewhere or recommended.