Ah yeah, via deref coercion, which is also called "auto-dereferencing" at times. Not to be confused with "auto-referencing", which is also a thing^1.

You can do some wild shit with deref coercion. And when I say "wild", I guess, I'm talking about the most normal thing for Java devs, because well, it's a lot like inheritance. 😅

Basically, this concept of being able to pass &String into a parameter that takes &str also applies to the self parameter. Or in other words, methods implemented on str can also be called on String, as if String extends str.
And well, obviously you can also make use of that yourself, by writing your own wrapper type. You can even "override" existing methods in a sense by re-defining them in the wrapper type.

I had to play around a bit with it myself, so here's a playground: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=af65ed396dec88c8406163acaa1f8f8d

I guess, if you come from garbage-collected languages, you might be used to not needing the ampersands, because everything is automatically a reference in those...