Comment by senkora

> You lose expressiveness

Or more, correctly, the following happens:

1. You gain the ability to use the compilation unit's anonymous namespace instead of a detail namespace, so there is better encapsulation of implementation details. The post author stresses this as the actual benefit of export templates, rather than compile times.

2. You lose the ability to instantiate the template for arbitrary types, so this is probably a no-go for libraries.

3. Your template is guaranteed to be compiled exactly once for each explicit instantiation. (Which was never actually guaranteed for real export templates).