Well, I'm thinking from a sort of low-level "what assembly does it generate" perspective, and from that perspective you can treat `&Cell<T>` almost as its own t

Well, I'm thinking from a sort of low-level "what assembly does it generate" perspective, and from that perspective you can treat `&Cell<T>` almost as its own type of reference, as if it were `&cell T` or something – in other words, a way to represent an aliasing mutable pointer in Rust's type system. After all, you can create a 'Cell reference' to any object, without actually creating a Cell in the first place, by using `Cell::from_mut` to go from `&mut T` to `&Cell<T>`. And all the read/write operations on Cell compile to the same assembly as directly reading or writing a pointer; it's just that the set of operations available is restricted for safety. From that low-level perspective, `&RefCell<String>` is something silly like "a reference to a structure containing a string and also a borrow count". ;p