At my first real dev job a big portion of my work heavily involved the Qt framework and, while at the time lambdas were still a big missing sore point, using that framework and their widespread habit of passing by const ref instead of pointer made me like C++ a lot more. I completely understand that pointers and dynamic memory management exists for really good reasons, but isolating global object creation into your main and leaning on internally managed lists of objects can be really strong from the perspective of writing good testable code.

I've been working primarily in PHP for a while now (and honestly put a lot less value on language comparison) but from what I've seen the expressiveness and power of C++ (at least in the ways I like it) have mostly been superseded by Rust and I think that'd be where I started if I ever need to work on something where in application logic would actually be a product bottleneck (instead of data source interaction).