Erm, yeah, you must of misinterpreted it in some way.
Note that the garbage collector entry from the DM Reference also states:
Another note is that the world.contents list does not count as a reference. Otherwise, /mob and /obj objects would never be deleted, which is not the case.
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According to [link], they had to do something a little awkward just to make sure that atoms were able to be collected because of world.contents, unless I just misinterpreted that too.