I'd say a lot of this is a form of survivorship bias. I've programmed in C++ since the mid 90s so I am used to a lot of C++'s issues, but I also run a company and have to train new engineers and I see first hand the absolute nightmare that a lot of people encounter learning this language and it's demoralizing. While to me a lot of this is stuff I managed to figure out, I also understand that for many new developers this is just crap that no one should have to deal with in 2023.

Lack of a good way to build third party libraries, build times that are astronomical and a true productivity killer, error messages that are entirely unhelpful and can produce giant walls of text for the most trivial of reasons, rampant undefined behavior that is incredibly hard to identify.

Several things changed my view on C++ and now I see it mostly as a sort of zombie language.

1. As I mentioned once I started my own business and needed to train new engineers on how to use C++, I started to look at the language from a fresh point of view and realized it really is a complex mess just to get basic things working.

2. Scott Meyers "retiring" from C++, and in particular this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ

3. I attended an ISO C++ meeting in Toronto and while I absolutely found that the people were very intelligent and knowledgeable, as well as well intentioned, I realized just how political C++ is and that much of its development and complexity is not due to technical constraints or driven based on what is in the best interest of the C++ community or research, but really based on name recognition and a lot of politics.

Unfortunately Bjarne himself has been responsible for a lot of political issues with C++ that could have easily been avoided such as the obvious warts with brace initialization and the paper he wrote that basically pushed out two of the most prominent members of the C++ community, Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu over what seems like a bitter pissing contest he had with them:

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n36...

C++ has had some improvements in the past decade for sure, but its future doesn't look too bright at this point. Features like modules are a convoluted mess that still don't work even 4 years after standardization. Coroutines are a lifetime and performance nightmare that was originally designed in particular to accommodate embedded platforms with no runtime, but are all but useless for that use case due to how they allocate memory, and concepts are really just a substitution of one hacky way of doing overload resolution with another hacky way of doing it.