I'm assuming you mean that this tech became available in OpenCV 25 years ago, but as it turns out, the underlying tech can be traced back much further, at least as far as 1977! :)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1674847 G. J. Vanderbrug and A. Rosenfeld, “Two-Stage Template Matching,” IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. C-26, No. 4, pp. 384–393, April 1977. DOI: 10.1109/TC.1977.1674847

Exactly my point. Template rotation is a trivial operation as well.