While I agree with you, and enjoy following Bjarne, the rise of VMs and scripting languages helped keeping C++ around.

Had Java and .NET do the proper thing, by following up on Oberon, Modula-3 and Eiffel, by having proper AOT compilation since day one, and on Java's case value types as well, developers would feel less pressured to turn to C and C++.

Basically if they had been released the same way Go was.