What exactly do you mean with "collision with other actors and the player is still generated, just not the ‘world’ "? Actors are part of the (game)world?
Other than that I’ve found the source code itself to be the best (and most up-to-date) documentation for C++. It may be a tedious process to find all the relevant pieces but once you do and the more you do it the easier it gets.
The first thing to note here is that most (if not all) Add/Set Location/Rotation/Transform etc. functions use MoveComponent internally (e.g. USceneComponent::SetWorldLocationAndRotation eventually calls USceneComponent::SetRelativeLocationAndRotation which calls MoveComponent which calls MoveComponentImpl which actually implements the movement). Now if you’re moving just plain scene components (or scene components NOT derived from UPrimitiveComponent that don’t override MoveComponentImpl) RelativeLocation/Rotation is computed and assigned, then the ComponentToWorld is updated.
Collision only comes into play with UPrimitiveComponent::MoveComponentImpl and only if bSweep is true. Collision must also be enabled and the distance of the delta must be > 0 (actually it must be > FMath::Square(4.f*KINDA_SMALL_NUMBER)). If the distance is 0 the component will only try to rotate. Once all of these checks have been passed, the component performs a ComponentSweepMulti and then process any hit results.