Not returning a reference is a waste of resources and a yields a weird design. Why do you want to do a copy for all users of your operator even if almost all of them will discard that value?
a = b; // huh, why does this create an unnecessary copy?
In addition, it would be surprising to users of your class, since the built-in assignment operator doesn’t copy likewise
int &a = (some_int = 0); // works