If/when I port to ARM I will probably conditionally compile to use atomic operations (or at least an explicit memory barrier) when on ARM, but for my x86/x86-64 code, since I don't need to, I'd rather avoid it. As you said, it would be overkill.

Since this is the only case where I do something strange, I don't mind handling platform specific code myself. The rest of the codebase delegates such things to libraries.