I do think you got lost in the specifics of the example and failed to see the forest for the trees there. The point, as far as I understood, was that when you have to handle a huge number of tiny objects of the same (ancestral) class, whatever they may represent, and you can split the intrinsic and extrinsic states, then you do so and create a pool of object instances to refer to for the representation of a particular "thing"'s intrinsic state. That's a "flyweight object" - a class that contains only intrinsic state in order for its instances to be usable in multitude.