In my humble opinion, after C++ 17, C++ does not need anyone's defense. I had worked on infrastructure pieces in Google and Facebook. Given the scale of data, and number of machines, it would not have viable without C++. Consider running 10 times faster using C++ still consuming thousands of machines that would have been 10s of thousands of machines. However, if your application runs fine using any slower language still consume single machine, it might not make sense in that case.