I too also appreciate the beauty of the "insane" algorithm, from a mathematical view. What I think gets lost on some programmers¹ is that, while that's all good and fine, we're not just doing a computation, we are doing a computation and we're inherently expending time and space to do that computation, and the amount of time and space is inherently part of the problem, or part of the requirements. I want to compute X, but I also do want to do it before the heat death of the universe. Attempting to sweep those under the rug with a "sufficiently smart compiler" is fun when it works, but I think in the sense of engineering software, we need a more rigorous answer to "it will not consume bonkers amounts of space/time to compute X."

"Accidentally Quadratic" was a fun tumblr dedicate to more real world instances of this, and it's sad they're not longer posting, though I still use that term to name real-world sightings of O(lol) time. (O(lol) space is just called "Java".)

¹and since you say "to actually compute it that way", I think you get this, but I want to point it out here