This is me too and sometimes I feel like the language is going in two directions. The academic / scholar path where people show off unreadable C++ like this and the business path where professionals that use a subset of the language (mandated by corporate code base or teams) that are competent C++ developers but maybe not writing this complicated C++.
I work in telecoms and 'template like this' show up from time to time sometimes for reasonable reasons, sometimes for 'optimisations' reasons which are not backed by figures (some programmers like to show off).
Templates, in my opinion, are often extremely hard to read, not unlike Perl in its time.
And I will always prefer more verbose code that I can read, understand and maintain.