I don't know when you went to school, but most places still teach using C++98, which is two generations removed from current practice. It is not unusual for TAs assigned to teach C++ to resent being taken away from their glorious combinators, and teach their resentment.
If coding C++ was not immense fun, you may be certain you were Doing It Wrong.
The author isn't claiming to go into a deep dive into C or C++. They are trying to talk about Rust. Your argument seems to be against the author's use of "C/C++" vs. "C and/or C++", which seems to me like some nitpicking, as the author uses "C/C++/Rust" later on. It isn't like they are pooling the languages as being the "same". Rather, they are talking about having similar, lower-level of control over "strings" as a data structure, as opposed to the primitives they seem to be in other high-level languages like C#, Python, Java, Go, Kotlin, Swift, or JavaScript.
I believe these two statements are accurate, though I'm happy to be corrected if they aren't. It's been a few years since I wrote C++. Beyond that, I see my claims as "abstract" and not "falsehoods".