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No, I think the article is right. When a value goes out of scope, its drop method is called, which for Box values deallocates it.

The trick is that if it is (possibly) returned from a function, it is moved instead of dropped.

It's also important to distinguish Box from Rc. Both are heap values but have very different behavior.

The text I quoted seemed to suggest that the reference going out of scope could trigger deallocation.

Which is true.

The word "reference" is overloaded, it can be used to mean "anything pointery that's guaranteed to exist" too. Box<T> in this context is a reference.

The post does kind of dance between definitions of "reference" a bit, but I think that's intentional.