Wrong description of types

[FrankHB]

A unique_ptr<node> is no longer a node—it’s a unique_ptr masquerading as a node. It’s preferable to retain the type of node*, and retain the properties of node*-ness that go along with it, because we don’t really actually care about unique_ptr for its own sake.

This is technically wrong. The type named node* is never equivalent to the type node in C or C++, neither. The * declarator in C or C++ is essentially another masquerading unary type constructor. It is actually aliased as something like std::add_pointer_t in modern C++. There is nothing new about "masquerading" once you can have parametric types in general, either with std::add_pointer_t<node> or node*.

You seem to have intention of preferring to the default typing discipline with less type safety guarantees (e.g. about unexpected subtyping between some_raw_ptr<node> vs some_owned_ptr<node>), but it is not reasonable from the description here.

Besides type safety and verbosity, there remains probably only one significant difference: * is built in the core language. This is just because it comes from the language without uniformed syntax of type constructor like C++ template, which is irrelevant here.