I'm wondering if 'somewhat numerical in nature' relates to lpack/blas and similar libraries that are actually dependencies of a wide range of desktop applications?

blas and lapack generally do manual multi-versioning by detecting CPU features at runtime. This is more useful 1 level up the stack in things like compression/decompression, ode solvers, image manipulation and so on that are still working with big arrays of data, but don't have a small number of kernels (or as much dev time), so they typically rely on compilers for auto-vectorization