It isn’t as hard as people make out but it also isn’t easy. The saving grace is that the language, particularly in its modern form, is highly amenable to an experienced user designing their own libraries that make the language much nicer to use. You can replace most of the dubious parts. Nonetheless, C++ is unreasonably large.

The main advantage of something like C++20 is that for some types of software there is no other language that comes close in both performance and economy. The alternatives either require much more code or giving up a lot of performance, neither of which is particularly palatable for many use cases. I am always keeping an eye out for smaller languages with similar economy and performance.