This is just making clear and easy to use something that people did using some type level magic (see shapeless Witness).

Something that people used through ugly hacks becoming part of the language natively in a easy to use and understand (and faster to compile) way sounds very much like pragmatism to me.

Here is the source code to Witness (and other singleton stuff in shapeless) https://github.com/milessabin/shapeless/blob/main/core/src/m...