I find that, if you enable all warnings, most as errors, and use clang-tidy and cppcheck, you end up with an incredibly powerful safe language. Now, combine that with some good patterns and avoidance of NIH syndrome, and you can get very far while keeping the huge amount of control and libraries that C++ gives.

Edit: And, of course, a lot of forced static typing and avoiding global scoped stuff. So, for example, you'd make a

    struct Meter {
        float value { 0.0f };
    };
    Meter wall_length;

instead of `float wall_length; // meters`.