[valarauca1]

    I think if more people took the time to understand
    them and practice writing them (when appropriate),
    they wouldn't have such a stigma.

I think this is part of the movement to a more "ide/web centric" development model. The chances to interaction with regexes on CLI are endless. Grep, git-grep, vim, sed, etc. Even bash has some limited regex integration. As a person who still does most their development in the cli with vim regexes are a massive part of my work flow I actively use them several times per day.

When people move away from this model there are a lot opportunities to practice regexes. I've noticed this my own workflow when working Java-centric languages (who's IDE's often have poor regex integration).