The depsgraph CoW mechanism is a bit of a misnomer. It creates an
evaluated copy for data-blocks regardless of whether the copy will
actually be written to. The point is to have physical separation between
original and evaluated data. This is in contrast to the commonly used
performance improvement of keeping a user count and copying data
implicitly when it needs to be changed. In Blender code we call this
"implicit sharing" instead. Importantly, the dependency graph has no
idea about the _actual_ CoW behavior in Blender.
Renaming this functionality in the despgraph removes some of the
confusion that comes up when talking about this, and will hopefully
make the depsgraph less confusing to understand initially too. Wording
like "the evaluated copy" (as opposed to the original data-block) has
also become common anyway.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/118338
81a63153d0