These pitfalls really aren't that bad. An extra copy here and there only matters in the tight loops. Some of the examples in the talk are really contrived. Am I going to insert the empty string many times as a string in a hash map? No, in most cases I am going to make sure that almost all of the keys that I generate are different. Sure, google can save on its electricity bill by doing micro-optimizations. For me trying that would be a bad trade.

Every language has its pitfalls and I tend to prefer C++ pitfalls to some other pitfalls. Lately I having been doing some python. Turns out a python -m venv is different from a virtualenv. Turns out pytest some/specific/test/file.py is different from python -m pytest some/specific/test/file.py. I am wishing quite hard this code base consisted of all C++. And of course mypying this is still on the TODO list so the type annotations that are there might well lie.