Is C++ not being opinionated enough a valid critique?

A lot of coworkers who I admire who are seasoned programmers all dislike C++ and warn against it for beginners because they view it being, which is frankly true, a massive primordial ooze of paradigms, libraries and quirks spanning decades, and that therefore it’s best avoided because it’s overwhelming and far too expressive to the point where collaboration and formalism is tricky (lots of creative ways to make your code hard to read and review adequately to philosophically different C++ programmers), apart from it also being still a bit unforgiving.

I’ve been working in C/C++ for about a year now a ton, professionally and recreationally, and despite being weary at first from what they were saying my experience with C++ has been great. Yes there is a ton of shit and a lot of weird quirks and a ton of stuff that you can but shouldn’t do, but no one is forcing you to use the antiquated stuff. Just using modern C++ idioms and using just what I need has been great, ergonomic, and powerful. So I’ve had none of the issues they were warning me about.

Maybe it’s having to do with collaborating with archaic C++ projects when it’s so permissibly expressive where the pain begins? I’ve worked in some third party libraries as well and the most trouble I’ve dealt with are people who like to do weird C-style programming with macros and eschewing methods, but apart from that it’s still been pretty straight forward.

Have other people heard of this criticism and what do you think about it? Yes C++ tries to support literally everything under the sun at the cost of some cohesive, philosophical defining shape for the language like Go and Rust unapologetically do, but I’ve not suffered for it. A couple good, modern libraries have gone a long, long way, and I’ve not needed to leave that bubble where I’m forced to contend with some library from the 90s like Boost or something. Their modern standard library seems genuinely fucking amazing and I’ve yet to find a need to stray from it and not just write idiomatic modern C++

I dare say they’ve pulled off the task of having fucking everything and still being pretty ergonomic if you just read a 10 minute “writing modern C++” article

https://redd.it/1pc9d7w
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