This makes things seem more complicated than they already are, I feel? There's nothing special about auto here. It deduces the same type as a template paramete

This makes things seem more complicated than they already are, I feel? There's nothing special about auto here. It deduces the same type as a template parameter, with the same collapsing rules. decltype(auto) is a different beast and it's much more confusing. It means, more or less, "preserve the type of the expression, unless given a simple identifier, in which case use the type of the identifier."