But honestly, people seem to get all hung up on C++ having weird features. No-one is being forced to use a feature just because it exists. I use the sub-set of C++ that I'm familiar with and grow it when it looks like it'll save a lot of effort relative to cost of learning it.
So... time to move to Rust then?
It's ok if you opt to not jump onto the latest and greatest, specially at the interface level.
What is counterproductive is to not learn new features, and know when and when not to use them.
It makes absolutely no sense to stay stuck in C++11 when there's a heap of basic features that were since made available throughout the last decade.
It's even more critical the fact that the C++ standardization effort placed a great deal of effort on vocabulary types, which by its own definition mean types excpliticly designed to be used in interfaces.
It's perfectly ok to make a call to not use exceptions, template metaprogramming, multi threaded support, etc. What's counterproductive is staying stuck way back in 2011 because you do not know what's out there.
For a lot of use cases, a plain C API wrapper is still very useful because it’s so easy to call from practically any other language. It can be better for maintenance to have a very narrow C API than to expose all the bells and whistles from C++ wonderland.