This is what probably 95% of us do. Don't like a C++ feature, don't use it. You can have a better C than C (at least for gamedev needs), or the bells and whistles from the functional languages. Yeah, some of them are ugly, but to be honest, after the first 5-6 times I see them, I no longer care.

Jon Blow says a language with less friction would make him much more productive. Let me tell you -- rockstar programmers at our company have tried that again, and again, and again. I spent the last 2 months trying to purge one such attempt from the codebase, because it ended up introducing all kinds of nasty bugs and unexpected limitations.

I still occasionally binge Jai videos and hope Jon proves my scepticism misplaced though :)