> Note that this is distinct from "auto-deref" (or deref coercion), another Rust feature that will automatically dereference pointers as necessary in certain cases, like calling a method on a struct (so there is no arrow operator "->" in Rust like in C++).

Is this actually distinct? The docs for the reference type explicitly says that &T implements Deref for T, so it seems like it's the exact same thing to me.

See https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.reference.html