If you can manage to not use shared_ptr (and, as the author says, you should try to) then you are not reference counting and you don't have circular references.

If you can manage to not use shared_ptr (and, as the author says, you should try to) then you are not reference counting and you don't have circular references. As with Rust, the very few places where you may need such constructs can be carefully isolated, the other 99% of your code is "basically" safe from dangling pointers and memory leaks.