Template meta-programming is a different usage from template generics. It has a higher compile time cost because it performs computations as a side-effect of compilation.
Which is what the commenter above was trying to say, templates are completely normal, vanilla C++. Also, I cannot think of any codebase that is actively under development and doesn't use some template magic, like at least tuples or variadic perfect forwarding etc... If you look at old codebases you can find them, but template metaprogramming is still very common, mainstream C++.
