I still think SIMD helper libraries (like xsimd or highway) have some good use in numerical computation and graphics, since you have so many complex equations to optimize that it's basically unrealistic to write all of it in assembly. And it's much better in terms of readability, xsimd has lots of operator overloading built in so you can still get readable math equations in SIMD code. Even if you get up to 80% of the achievable performance of assembly it's still a much better improvement then plain scalar code or relying on auto-vectorization. (And if that isn't enough you can start optimizing in assembly for only the most frequently used functions)