But you would still have to deal with the mental load associated with having templates in your stack. I don't know if C++ is still as bad as it was back in my d

But you would still have to deal with the mental load associated with having templates in your stack. I don't know if C++ is still as bad as it was back in my day about vomiting 20-line error messages at you because "std::vector<std::string>" or something has a billion implied template arguments. That was definitely a cost that one had to bear even if one never used the "template" keyword.