From personal experience, it's not that bad. C++ is "Java plus you need to worry about these other things", and it pays off in power and speed. They're not so similar in safety/scope terms, but the structure and design have enough in common that you get plenty of spare brainpower to worry about managing C++.

It was, for instance, a way more natural transition than "Java and C++ to OCaml". Less educational, but as usual that trades against easy.

In particular, the lack of pointers in Java would probably annoy the article author as much as Rust does.

Personally (not the author) I am more annoyed by the gutted single inheritance no traits type system.

You have numeric pointers into arrays, they're called indices.