I like C++, but it's not the language that you would design if you hadn't accumulated so much cruft over the years. Rust didn't have to support C compatibility and compatibility with earlier C++ standards. So Rust could be designed properly for modern use cases.

There's necessary complexity to express certain concepts, but C++ has accumulated a lot of unnecessary complexity over the years.

Rust, in terms of GC-less languages with mostly zero-cost abstractions is the simplest language that I've seen. And having a GCless language with memory safety is not just fashion. It's pretty much the greatest single advancement in language design since the GC itself.