You shouldn't use what's demonstrated in the article in a random commit in the middle of business logic.

But even in a real-world project, using this technique might have value as part of an internal implementation detail of a useful component that leverages C++26 reflection.

"trying to do any of the things discussed in this article should be an automatic commit rejection on any project" is a very strong statement that suggests you won't even care about the particular situation. It implies that, as soon as you see something that you deem overly weird, you immediately reject it without considering why it is weird and if that weirdness is needed to achieve a valuable goal.

Even in a mature and robust project there is room for esoteric techniques if well justified, commented out, and weighed against alternatives.

To give you a realistic example: you can reflect on struct data member names even if C++20 if you parse __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ at compile time. This is what Boost.PFR, Lahzam, and my own MiniPFR libraries do.

It's what a common developer would refer as "disgusting", "weird", and what would prompt the average C++ hater to take the opportunity to bash the language and remind the world how they think that the Standards Committee is a bunch of incompetent people. Not saying this is what you think, but you see where I'm coming from.

If people had applied blank statements like yours and decided that any code parsing __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ at compile time "should be an automatic commit rejection on any project", we wouldn't have a genuinely useful feature that allows us to reflect data member names in C++20, six years prior to having official reflection.

Yes, it's an esoteric technique. It's a hack, a workaround for a language limitation or language design failure. It's "experts-only" or whatever. Exactly the same way you feel about what the article demonstrates.

Yet, there was a good use case for it -- a very useful and valid one.

Outright banning certain techniques because you cannot understand how they could be valuable in very specific scenarios is honestly infuriating. Obviously, the use of niche/dangerous workarounds should not be liberally promoted. At the same time, automatically rejecting any commit is an insult to the intelligence of the person who wrote that code: perhaps they had a good reason to write it that way.

Things C++26 define_static_array can't do