I am not saying you are cargo cult programming, but being a cargo cult programmer has nothing to do with seniority. There are plenty of people who have been programming for decades who blindly follow rules because that's how they learned things, that's what they were taught is good practice, and they never bothered to question it, reflect on it, and they go along with it because of cultural reasons rather than because they have a genuine understanding of the principles.

>I might be wrong, but these are the lessons I've learnt over the decades working on a variety of projects of different size and durations ...

But what lesson did you learn? That long names are better than short names, which is what I called cargo cult programming and an instance of mixing up the metric for the principle? Or did you instead learn that descriptive names are better than non-descriptive names?

If it's that long names are better than short names, then by all means continue using std:: everywhere. If instead it's that descriptive names that communicate purpose or intention or actual information are better than non-descriptive names, then having a bunch of std:: everywhere doesn't do much of anything to help readability, it just adds noise.

Now people can and do justify the use of std:: but I've never heard it on the basis of making code more readable. There is nothing self documenting about a bunch of names that all share a common prefix.

And this doesn't even touch on how ironic it is that std is itself non-descriptive jargon that is an abbreviation of standard, but I am almost certain that if everyone had to liter their codebase with standard:: everywhere, no one would think twice about what the right thing to do is.