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Trying to make CIDs only usable as a pointer would be nice from a
consistency perspective, but has other consequences.

It's easy to forget this (and I apparently just did), but...
We often use link types as map keys.  And this is Important.

That means trying to handle CIDs as pointers leads to nonsensical
results: pointers are technically valid as a golang map key, but
they don't "do the right thing" -- the equality check ends up operating
on the the pointer rather than on the data.  This is well-defined,
but generally useless for these types in context.