respectfully disagree—this is very much a regex dsl. folks still need to conceptually understand regex to use this, which begs the question about who this is for.

the best use case i can think of is large and complicated expressions, but i’d need to see more of that to have a definitive opinion.

I don’t know all the forms of regex but might it be useful to have this capable of compiling to different types of regex?

if it can only be used to create regexes, and all programs compile to regexes, then it is a regex flavor in itself.

And let's not kid ourselves, regexes are not that hard. They can look cryptic, but in most cases they're not really that hard to understand.

all this does is make it much more verbose and introduce the HUGE inconvenience of a separate compiler for regexes, since regexes are typically embedded within other files written in other languages that this compiler can't understand. So somehow regexes would end up needing their own file.