He is quite right, yes C++ is a monster dragon, but most languages of similar age only look simple on the surface, even a beginners friendly language like Python.

Beneath that simple surface for beginners lies a multi-paradigm language, with overloading, metaclasses, dynamic code generation, multiple inheritance, breaking changes across minor versions in 30 years of history, a standard library that can be used as doorstep when printed, several implementations not 100% semantic compatible with CPython,.....