Sure, but I guess that's the point --- the GCs in Java and Go can handle any allocation pattern you throw at them reasonably well, but there's not, as far as I know, such a "one-size-fits-all" solution in C++ (not that it needs one.)

If you don't want to plan out proper (as in performant) data structures and memory management, C++ is indeed the wrong language. And judging by the stuff discussed in comments above, this is exactly what happened here.

I'm not sure I would call 'using your entire CPU to do trivially small heap allocations' a pattern unless you mean that it's a pattern you see when people wonder why their software is so slow.