Notice that I didn't say all cases. Just the most common ones. When you require shared ownership of an object, of course, you'd use an appropriate smart point

Notice that I didn't say all cases. Just the most common ones. When you require shared ownership of an object, of course, you'd use an appropriate smart pointer (shared_ptr). But shared ownership is not very common (well, at least in the systems that I design). However before C++11/14, you had to use pointers and heap allocated objects in cases that have nothing to do with shared ownership because passing objects by value would incur a substantial overhead. Now that we have move, copy elision and library classes like std::optional (which I forgot to mention earlier) it's not the case any more.