Programming

It matters if you develop compilers 🤷,

Otherwise? Readability trumps the minute performance gain almost every time (and that's assuming your compiler won't automatically do branchless substitutions for performance reasons anyway which it probably will)

The better of those articles and videos also emphasize you should test and measure, before and after you "improved" your code.

I'm afraid there is no standard, average solution. You trying to optimize your code might very well cause it to run slower.

So unless you have good reasons (good as in 'proof') to do otherwise, I'd recommend to aim for readable, maintainable code. Which is often not optimized code.

I only know of a handful of cases where branchless programming is actually being used. And those are really niche ones.

So no. The average programmer really doesn't need to use it, probably ever.

If you want your code to run on the GPU, the complete viability of your code depend on it. But if you just want to run it on the CPU, it is only one of the many micro-optimization techniques you can do to take a few nanoseconds from an inner loop.

The thing to keep in mind is that there is no such thing as "average developer". Computing is way too diverse for it.

As a webdev I've honestly never even heard of it