As an N=1 sample point, I've programmed in Rust for years now, extensively using generics, and have not once ran into this issue.

NP-hardness only shows the worst case is really difficult. It does not mean that an approach is not useful. For example, Rust's exhaustive pattern matching is also technically NP-hard: https://niedzejkob.p4.team/rust-np/

Yeah, I don't mean to criticize the approach taken by other languages at all. Programmers want powerful type systems and fast compilation times and good error messages, and unfortunately this is one of the cases where things are really fundamentally, mathematically provably, at odds with each other in PL ergonomics. It's a wicked problem, not one you can "get it right".

But these "Go's ignoring decades of PL research!" comments are, at best, tiresome even when somewhat true. In this case it's the outright opposite.