Yeah, I did want to ideally avoid function overloads as I think it feels cumbersome. But heck, if 'they' didn't have a better solution for print, what chance do I have! 
I do understand my issue here, that C/C++ are statically typed and that we're responsible for knowing the types of our variables.
But in a 2021 world,where C++ can do seemingly anything it likes, center aligning an lcd (you would think!) should be trivial.