C++ has a few central, and laudible, goals:

* ABI compatibility with C

* Backward compatibility with much older versions

* "You don't pay for what you don't use"

They hit these goals squarely, and continue to keep these goals front and center.

I would say that starting with C++11, the language improved considerably, and recent versions have a lot of modern, slick, concise features.

That said, even though a plurality of all my coding has been in C++, I have moved away from it over the last 20 years.

It's verbose; the development cycle is very slow; even careful beginners regularly add nasty, non-obvious bugs into their code, and even experienced developers do it prettty often.

And I simply haven't needed that last ounce of performance recently. If I ever did, I might strongly consider learning Rust, which had made a good impression on me.