Eh, from what I've seen, a lot of what people now consider to be the "warts" of C++ were there when I learned it in the '90s. Not all, obviously — but a lot of them, like the STL and all the relics of C, are quite old.

It seems similar to JavaScript. There were some initial good ideas and a bunch of early bad ideas and we're stuck layering improvements over that very uneven base.