In some obscure technical sense you might be correct, that identifying some piece of code is hard, but that little of C++ obscurantism is rarely why code isn't

In some obscure technical sense you might be correct, that identifying some piece of code is hard, but that little of C++ obscurantism is rarely why code isn't easy to read. With C++ it easier to express higher level concepts. I can have a map of strings to some class instance. Then I can use some string to lookup class instances. There are simple idiomatic ways to do this. They are short to writes (<10 lines), they will have decent performance and will be low on bugs and clear ownership semantics. With C it is common to have an array of pointer to pointer to void pointers. To get associative lookup it might be even worse and have functions that need to pointer to pointers, with who knows what ownership model and what idioms in use.