You can totally do fine without generics depending what you do. It mostly affects code that supposed to be reusable, especially libraries.

you sound like you're too smart for generics.

No I’m likely too dumb for them but my code base is clean and easy to onboard people to. I take great pride in new hires telling me something is easy to do after only working in it a week

And like i said generics have a place its just a way smaller place than many people think

Same here. But I think it's more laziness than 'too smart.'

I like to liken it to house construction. Imagine if a number of people demanded that natural gas and water be combined. Why do I have to make two separate pipes? They even look the same!

There are just things you can’t do without having generics in your language. User-defined collections, for one. Statically typed higher order functions, for another. To paraphrase (I believe) Bob Harper, you either have a statically typed language with generics, or you have a dynamically typed language. That’s the result of not having generics. Code that needs them becomes more dangerous and error-prone.