I agree with the author; I still long for the not-overly-complicated C++ back in the 00s I could write super-fast 3D rendering engine without much bloat. I find

I agree with the author; I still long for the not-overly-complicated C++ back in the 00s I could write super-fast 3D rendering engine without much bloat. I find it very appalling when C++ went from a poster child of imperative programming to implementing monads in its libraries (mind you, monads are used to "simulate" imperative programming in functional programming). Something went wrong there...