They're not actually writing these template instantiations, you would write regular strings in your code. The whole point is that this is for a logging library

They're not actually writing these template instantiations, you would write regular strings in your code. The whole point is that this is for a logging library that does compile-time trickery to replace strings with integer labels. They have some compile-time tricks to convert the strings passed in logging macros to these template instantiations. I'm guessing the way it works is that since each of these template instantiations represents a unique type they can convert each type to a known numeric code, and then have a map of codes to the original strings to read the log data. But the point is you'd only have to deal with these weird templates if you're actually implementing or debugging the library, which hopefully you'd only have to do rarely (ideally just once!).