The even crazier thing about opto is that it's old hat at this point. You can teach an attentive undergraduate lab assistant to do it and a sizeable portion of labs working with any animal short of a primate did or does use it to address questions.
Really depends on what kind of work you're doing. CRISPR, flexible high-density microelectrodes, scRNA-seq, etc. are all borderline magic compared to the average understanding of biology.
I just remember being awed by opto around a decade ago and now it's just a tool that labs have. Which isn't to say there's not cutting edge opto.
