I wonder if we're talking at cross-purposes here. While it is certainly useful to write abstractions of common algorithms and access patterns for data structure

I wonder if we're talking at cross-purposes here. While it is certainly useful to write abstractions of common algorithms and access patterns for data structures generically, any useful program ultimately has to deal with data of known types. Those might come from the domain model, or they might be implementation tools like file handles or database queries, but they are something specific, some concrete type that is relevant to the problem at hand.