Comment by locknitpicker

> I read Effective Modern C++ years ago and was confused exactly like what you describe.

It's been a while since I read it, but if I recall correctly the book focused on special member functions and when the compiler actually stepped in for the developer, not the actual concept of move semantics. Those are different things.

Special member functions is a development experience issue, and covers aspects such as "can I get the compiler going to generate code for me". If you write code that tells the compiler it should not generate move constructors for you, often it ends up generating copy constructors. That's it.