This has been the story with C++ forever. I think currently half the standardization and compiler implementation bandwidth is taken up by turning C++ into the slowest virtual machine ever devised (constexpr).

The constexpr story is presumably very similar to what happened with templates. There was a genuine niche use case, and that was perfectly covered in the initial implementation. But the feature just lends itself perfectly to extremely clever, single A4 page example code. No one ever went "ooh" and "aah" at a basic_string::split paper.