There should be a middle ground. The main issue with operator overloading is that every overload exists in the global scope. Thus, you get issues and surprises

There should be a middle ground. The main issue with operator overloading is that every overload exists in the global scope. Thus, you get issues and surprises with unknown or competing overloads. Sometimes, a workable solution would be to have overloads restricted to a kind of named scope that the calling code can enter explicitly. Maybe something like operator_context(mz_vector_ops) { ... } which makes all operators defined in the context of my_vector_ops apply to expressions within the block, but nowhere else.