Being able to stop constantly keeping things in the back of your head and just trusting the compiler to complain if something is off was the biggest differentiator for me by far. Less footguns = more better
When I switch to C++11 and unitue_ptr things got a lot better. There is still a lot of cruft from old code, but C++ is a lot better as of 12 years ago. I don't let people manage raw pointers without good reason (I wouldn't let someone use unsafe rust without good reason either)