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I wasn't involved in the design decision but asked myself the same question as @nnmm . One thing I noticed is that shared pointers are pervasive in that if you use shared_from_this inside the class definition (and that happens quite a bit) so the node can pass itself to members, then it would be undefined behavior until C++17 if the node wasn't created as a shared pointer; cf https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/enable_shared_from_this/shared_from_this

Certainly not great to require knowing how your instance is created/stored but that's how it is.