I have no horse in this race[1], and tried not to use opinionated language. Of course there can't be a conspiracy when Stroustrup said what he was gonna do beforehand. But IIUC there was already a two-thirds majority to finalize the draft, so that's hardly railroading.

[1] I'm still in the C camp, and don't write C++, but contracts seem of dubious value given the lack of guarantees about whether something can be compile-time vs runtime enforced. It's sold as a safety thing but in reality it seems the value is more about optimization & performance and potentially could cause security issues of it's own.