Yes, not only does it apply only to lvalue expressions, it only applies with lvalue-to-rvalue conversion, which happens less often in C++ — and when applied to class types, it gets short-circuited to a copy constructor call.
All the examples in the DR refer to lvalue-to-rvalue conversion applied by the comma operator, which doesn’t happen in C++ because value category tends to propagate. Analogous arguments can be formed by replacing them with static_cast to non-reference types. In C++ this unambiguously creates new objects with unique addresses, so type punning by static_cast is either OK for trivially copyable unions (N3797 §12.8/16), or dependent on the copy constructor.
I think it would be better to fill the role of effective type with a concept orthogonal to lvalue-to-rvalue conversion.
- D