You are very right. I have programmed for a long time in C++98 and "Modern C++" does feel somewhat alien to me. I don't see the actual need for some features (eg. range for is just syntactic sugar) while threading etc. are very welcome. The combinatorial explosion arising from mixing and matching all the available features really makes code using advanced techniques nearly opaque to "ordinary" programmers. So unless needed otherwise we have to confine ourselves to a "familiar subset" of the language; very few people can have mastery of the full language.