It looked to me like most of the raw pointers in the blog were const. Sometimes you don't want the baggage of smart pointers and getting a cheap easily copyable

It looked to me like most of the raw pointers in the blog were const. Sometimes you don't want the baggage of smart pointers and getting a cheap easily copyable view of your data is nice, so you want to return a const T. Usually if an API returns a const T I assume lifetimes are handled for me and that the ptr is valid as long as it is not nullptr.