OTOH, refactoring in C++ is not hard, at least from my experience. With some knowledge of the language, everyone can write reasonably bug-free C++ (or any other language) application in one go.
Compilation in C++ is a different story. C# is not native. It's converted to CLI (was that the name, I don't use Win32 for ~15 years), then JIT compiles it to machine code, and optimizes over and over in every execution.
Yes, C# is reasonably fast, but it's not native, cross platform (mono doesn't count), and designed to be a systems programming language.
People tend to think C++ is overly verbose, no. Win32 programming model forces simple operations to be long and time consuming for a programmer to implement. Opening a file, serial port, or anything is a single line, because of the (while not everyone likes it) "everything is a file" philosophy, which makes UNIX and C++ much easier, verbose, and accessible.
It can be compiled to native code just like C++ via NGEN, .NET Native, CoreRT, IL2CPP, Bartok, Mono AOT.
Or if you prefer, C++ is not native. It's converted to LLVM bitcode, OS/400 TIMI, WASM,....
Lets not mix languages with implementations.
In that sense, you are absolutely right.
However, for simplicity I only thought about the out of the box experience, or by the de-facto implementation of the said languages, since it’s the most popular usage scenario as well.
And NGEN is a standard component of the .NET SDK since the beta days.
So AOT compilation has been part of the default tooling since ever.
I would say that the C family languages are traditionally native of most operating systems [1] as they are polyglot and can directly speak whatever C ABI dialect is used there; they also work with the native platform tools.
C# is really native of the .Net platform and although it can be AoT compiled it either can't talk directly with Win32 or the interfacing is not seamless. Also it has its own set of tools.
Android and iOS are interesting because although they are clearly unix derivatives, the unix interface is not the primary interface; so arguably C and C++ are not really native there while Java and ObjectiveC/Swift respectively are.
[1] Or to be fair, of unix and any operating system that can be made to look like unix (Windows).
Well then Rust, D, Swift, Go, Rust, Haskell, OCaml are not native by that measure.
C# integration with Win32, COM and UWP (aka COM reborned) is painless comparing with any of them.
edit: to be clear, using 'compiles to object code' as the definition of Native, is both a misuse of the word, and meaningless as it is a implementation detail that can change easily and bound to be obsolete quickly.
Bonus points if it is a UWP one.
NGEN
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/ngen...
AOT Compilation for Windows 8.x store apps, based on Singularity's Bartok compiler
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-005
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mani-Ramaswamy-an...
AOT Compilation for Windows 10 store apps, using Visual C++ backend
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Inside-NET-Native
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/net-native...
Also, since C++ is native, very memory efficient data structures can be written. This property can be leveraged to write very small, very efficient and very resilient loops to be written which can run for months at a time, and since you have the absolute control over memory management, you can prevent unwanted bloating or leaks pretty easily.
Last, but not the least; CPUs weren't that powerful 10-15 years ago. My desktop computer was as fast as the first Raspberry Pi. Python, JS, even Java were very unpleasant experiences back then.