This has more or less been my experience too. Things like UI toolkits or game engine primitives are often solved nicely with inheritance. I've been doing a lot

This has more or less been my experience too. Things like UI toolkits or game engine primitives are often solved nicely with inheritance. I've been doing a lot with LeafletJS lately, and it has some light inheritance around its drawing primitives (things like boxes, circles and lines you draw on top of maps). It works well. For 3D engines you still need to be quite careful with where you apply it though. It's possible to get into a huge mess if you use it too much.