The difficulty of C++ is way too much over rated. Most mediocre projects can be written with basics of C++ (that everyone can learn in less than 3 months).
We could have lived in a way performant world, if people would stop horrifying beginners about difficulties of C++/Rust/...
Go talk to a beginner, the moment you say anything about C/C++, the first thing they mention is, what do you do for buffer overflows? They don't even know what it is, but they are worried about it.
You can't get around the fact that languages like Python and JavaScript are better suited for beginners. From their perspective, it should be horrifying. At least until they properly learn it.
Is this really a good excuse with containers being used so frequently?
Portability – not so much, but then it saves you so much headache because switching from 16.04 to 18.04 should not break anything in your system.
Should have used K&R braces
But honestly, I agree with that approach to a certain (!) extent. I don't want to write all of my backend in C++. I use Java or Python instead. Thousand reasons: maven/pip, portability etc.
So, I would say we need to come to terms with ourselves and agree that the productivity is sometimes increased at the expense of the system quality. After that, I think it's okay to keep doing that if both us and our customers are OK with the tradeoff.
Just to illustrate: do I like the RAM consumption & the startup time of my Slack app? No. But I am a free user, so I can't complain. In the end, the Slack team probably made the right choice.
UPD: 500 error is gone. Gitlab also needs to manage costs and be friendly to the OSS contributors. Ruby was also probably a good choice for them. If you want top-notch software, be prepared to stomach NASA-grade costs, because the rumour is that 1 LOC in Shuttle ended up costing $1500 [1].
P.S. Thanks a lot for the [2] paper reference!
[1] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/10/08/nasa-buggy-softwar...