In their basic form templates solve an obvious problem in an obvious way. It doesn't make sense to make the same data structure for every type, you want to make

In their basic form templates solve an obvious problem in an obvious way. It doesn't make sense to make the same data structure for every type, you want to make the data structure generic and sub in the type every time you use it. The extremes of template meta programming are self imposed by people being fancy while writing libraries and the value is questionable. On top of that no one thinks that C++ templates are the ideal way to do complex meta programming.