Rust has become fairly big now, no? Is there some objective metric that can show Rust is a "smaller" language (I bet it is, but I don't think it's by a lot)?
There’s not really any metric of a language being objectively “big” or “small” but I could point at several features where the Rust feature is significantly less complex than the C++ one. Additionally, C++ has more features that Rust doesn’t than the reverse.