[publicola1990]

In general though c++ has some level of feature orthogonality, that is features you don't use will not hurt you. But for large projects, C++ is the saner choice with its builtin library of data structures, templating, namespaces etc..

All these could perhaps be done in c, but why spent a lot of time making this infrastructure if one could spent more time on ones application domain solutions.

[CraigJPerry]

You gloss over the complexity cost of having too many overlapping tools in the bag though, a complexity cost that has drowned projects in the past. Arguably C++ as a language could be improved if someone was able to depreciate and remove the "legacy" parts.

In practice though that's simply not possible. E.g. trivial example but you couldn't ever depreciate #include even though we have #import now.

Instead of "fixing" the language, there's written (not enforced by the compiler) documentation https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines - actually the first line is the perfect summary:

"Within C++ is a smaller, simpler, safer language struggling to get out." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

This is great documentation (and many parts are relevant to other languages) but many of its proscriptions cannot be enforced by the compiler so it will always be opt in, mis interpreted or ignored.