You just described me in my 20s as well. I used to revel in my knowledge of C++ minutiae and being able to quote parts of the standard and recognize obscure und

You just described me in my 20s as well. I used to revel in my knowledge of C++ minutiae and being able to quote parts of the standard and recognize obscure undefined behavior. Then I started a company and hired people to work with me and it hit me just how much of an absolute waste of time it is to know that stuff. It doesn't translate or generalize well, most C++ is a special kind of complexity that is only relevant to C++, and then when you hire people you can actually assign a dollar cost to the complexity and that cost is simply not worth it. I still use C++ at my company, but I now use a very simple and straight forward subset of it, basically along the lines of C with classes and namespaces. No more boost, no more elaborate SFINAE, no more writing things to be so generic and obtuse and avoiding parts of the language that are too abstract. In that vein I also avoid all of the mess introduced by C++20. Concepts were a missed opportunity, modules are beyond useless, and the fact that C++20 has both coroutines and ranges just shows how the language is designed in a Frankenstein manner. A good solution for coroutines would make the use of ranges unnecessary, and a good solution for ranges would make coroutines unnecessary. Instead C++20 provides half-assed implementations of both.