I follow the same philosophy, to the point where at this point I barely use the STL; most of that template-heavy junk has been replaced in most of my projects. For instance, most of what I typically used <iostream> for was replaced with a 150-line .h (plus a 50-line .cpp that uses explicit template insantiation and a <charconv> include). {fmt} was too heavy for me. And I'm locked into C++17 because C++20 seems to double down on the 20k-line header madness.

When I was stuck with C++ codebases that forced me to take a mandatory coffee break every time I needed to run a bit of new code, it made me a little bit insane! Never again.

> I just wrote a new server instead.

I'm sorry, this makes no sense at all. Why would anyone write a new server just because a small component was taking a minute to build?