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> Just because a feature can be misused doesn't mean it's not legitimately useful.

The point isn't that it can't be useful.

In the real world, the amount of code I'm forced to understand that uses overly complicated abstractions is the issue. I'm glad one language finally took the opposite direction.

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> In the real world, the amount of code I'm forced to understand that uses overly complicated abstractions is the issue.

This may say more about the specific codebases you work in than it does the software world at large. I spend most of my time in a couple of languages that all have generics and don't experience the problem you describe.

There are good and bad abstractions. In my experience good ones are usually grounded in math. Used the way they are intended generics/parametric polymorphism should reduce your cognitive burden. Eg. having a single, well defined and tested abstraction like Set that is type safe and its operators can work on any type it can contain is surely a good and worthwhile abstraction. The same goes for parametrically polymorphic functions that need not know about the concrete types they operate on and with the proposed contracts they can optionally require that its argument types possess a given constraint/capability like equality.

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