[articulatepang]

> In reality what happens is that software which has at any point cared about being portable doesn't use them.

I don't think this generalization is actually true. Fast portable software compiles conditionally based on the target platform, picking the fast platform-specific intrinsic, and falls back to a slow but guaranteed portable software implementation. This pattern is widespread in numerical linear algebra, media codecs, data compressors, encryption, graphics, etc.