I feel like what you’re touching at is kind of the core of why C++ can be so difficult to parse through sometimes. It really is trying to make a general purpose abstraction while also having a low overhead. This results in a need for detail and complexity that you can simply not need to worry about in languages like Python or Clojure.

When my university peers and I were learning C++, a lot of us strongly preferred using C99 since it didn’t seem as awful in terms of complexity and verbosity.