[ahartmetz]

There is certainly much more accumulated cruft in C++, but you can write your C++ program ignoring most of it. You will have to deal with some of Rust's harder parts rather soon.

[roca]

You can write a C++ program ignoring most of it, but when you go to work on someone else's C++ program, or import someone else's C++ code (i.e. most real-world programming) you will have to deal with it.

And when you're not working alone you will spend a lot of energy discussing which C++ subset you will use, and enforcing that.