It can feel good to imagine yourself an enlightened master among code monkeys, yet on practice, everybody can be a code monkey sometimes, and when this happens in C/C++, it will leave a ticking time bomb in the codebase, that will lay there until a customer blows up on it, no matter how many millions went into QA of the product.

And on practice, C/C++ developers are among lower-paid programmers - probably because "banging out ideas" and producing actual programs that actually work, are valued more than language elitism.

It’s actually not true at all that C++ developers are lower paid. Rather, their pay is highly bimodal. Most work at all FAANGMULA companies is C++.