[torginus]

Yes unfortunately, C++ has a long history of features that were supposed to be much more limited than how they ended up being used - but engineers ended up finding holes in these fences, and that's how we ended up with things like SFINAE and weird compile time code execution methods.

People ended up getting celebrated for their cleverness and not horrified by the abuse of good taste, and many of these tricks appeared in core C++ libraries like Boost.

So doing stuff like this is unfortunately just part of C++ culture, and allows you to emulate proper features that using a C++ standard that's at least a decade older.