[GolDDranks]

Because even with generics, you are not able to express "or"; two different choices of types that have _different_ APIs. With generics, you can express n different choices of types that have all the _same_ API.

It's a good software engineering principle to make control and data flow as streamlined as possible, for similar data. Minimize branches and special cases. Generics help with this, they hide the "irrelevant" differences, surfacing only the relevant.

On the other hand, if there are _actually_ different cases, that need to be handled differently, you want to branch and you want to express that there are multiple choices. Sum types make this a compiler-checked type system feature.