Shared ownership is a rare case, so in general using shared_ptr should already raise some suspicion. And in this case there is no reason any of the shared_ptr'e

Shared ownership is a rare case, so in general using shared_ptr should already raise some suspicion. And in this case there is no reason any of the shared_ptr'ed things in the code need to be on the heap so no reason to even have a pointer in the first place. Code like this is effectively what you get when you have someone that doesn't know how to write C++ but writes it anyway and uses pointers everywhere because they either read that C++ is pointer heavy (it's not) or have learned C++ through some course that is actually a course on algorithms and only uses C"++" as example language and is hence at best showing shitty C with iostream and classes straight out the 1980s. Then those people find the (correct) advice of using smart pointers instead of (owning!!!) raw pointers and just put shared_ptr everywhere without thinking about if there actually is a shared ownership to be expressed and/or if the heap allocation is even needed.