One huge thing they have on their side is that their implementation is concrete. Whatever it is that, say, GCC does is de facto actually a thing a compiler can do. The standards bodies (and WG21 has been worse by some margin, but they're both guilty) may standardize anything, but concretely the compiler can only implement some things. "Just do X" where X isn't practical works fine on paper but is not implementable. This was the fate of the Consume ordering. Consume/ Release works fine on paper, you "just" need to have whole program analysis to implement it. Well of course that's not practical so it's not implemented.