[comex]

Whether or not that is the case, it is completely irrelevant to the topic of the article, unless C++ would help with the "shouldn't have to exist" part. I imagine that a language like Racket which can embed (vector) images directly into source files might help, but C++ has nothing like that, nor do most languages. You could argue that making icon sets for iOS is harder than it has to be, but that would be an IDE and/or tooling problem, not an Objective-C issue specifically.