Does anyone in their work find that they are able to employ data structures like this, and if so, what do you work on? I've almost always had to delegate all my state to a database using default indexes, etc., which is productive, yet a little disappointing, because I'm always applying my brain power instead toward more mundane tasks.
Though my use of stranger data structures is relatively rare in my line of work, I enjoy learning them because they keep revealing new ways to approach problems. It's less "I use CRDTs" and more "CRDTs have changed what I think is feasible", similarly for stuff like bloom filters (no-false-negatives can be very powerful) and locality-sensitive hashing (don't search for all X every time, pre-compute a simpler version so you only check promising items). Concurrent data structures have also been pretty fruitful, since they're also often "how can we guarantee X in our distributed system, and what primitives do we need" strategies / solutions.
(obviously some of this is "I learned a tangential thing while learning about X", but that's kinda the point. you may never use a rope, but you might be introduced to a new idea in the process of learning about it)