The premise that three-way string comparisons are widely used is spurious at best.
There are many ways to approach this type of problem, and–while I understand that some may want to lean on this approach, based on their experiences with another language–this is an academic comparison, and far less useful than one might believe when building performant code.
To each their own.
Man, it is the key to do binary-searching.
> ... based on their experiences with another language ...
Sorry, this is language independent.