People aren't trying to turn the C++ programming language into a financial system with wide adoption.

No, but how many C++ programmers could actually understand its spec? How many people who own an Intel processor could actually understand its manual? How many people who live in your country could actually understand its tax code? Could you, off the top of your head, explain where the bank where you hold your primary bank account keeps its assets, and how likely this particular combination of assets is likely to lead to a bankruptcy, when compared with other banks? How many people could actually understand the relevant financial statements that answer this question? Same goes for retirement funds and their investment portfolios, insurance policies, election laws, or even phone / internet contracts.

If you think that all systems need (or even should) be understandable before being widely deployed, I'd argue crypto is still simpler than what we already have.

Except in order to be the anonymous, decentralized, supposedly free replacement for the financial sector, you do need to understand most of that stuff. If you use stuff like Metamask and the coin exchanges to pull money in and out, your wallets are now associated with your accounts on those services. This is why it was so straightforward for various news outlets to report the various meme-NFTs that kicked off this mess being sold for six figures to whales in the market, and the people behind them getting rich. It's ALL out there. If you can figure out someone's wallet address, you can use that to see every transaction they've ever done with every wallet, and with basic reasoning, parse out basically their entire use of the crypto ecosystem.

In this way, what's sold as this regulatory and authority bucking system is not only not doing that at all, it's if anything, even EASIER for people who aren't you to see what you're doing. The only way to engage with any of these products and keep your anonymity is to do so basically with either your own code, or ways of accessing the chains that are HIGHLY technical.

So which is it? Is this trying to be the hobby horse of gambling-addicted tech bros, or is it a replacement financial system that enables transacting business without governmental or legal oversight? Because it can be one of these but it can't be both, and frankly, BOTH suck in their own ways.