That's really a modern problem that happened after mobile became mainstream - but by the time that happened nobody was pushing C++ for app development anymore -

That's really a modern problem that happened after mobile became mainstream - but by the time that happened nobody was pushing C++ for app development anymore - Android was Java only for frontend and iOS was objc. If you did apps in days where C# and Java took over for C++ mobile still wasn't a thing and macos was super niche (especially in enterprise) - few people really cared about cross platform - demonstrated by C# being windows only and growing in popularity during the time. Visual Studio dev experience was just better than anything comparable at the time (Borland stuff was dead by C# era) and C++ was just an inferior language for app development (especially pre modern C++ where you couldn't even rely on stl being implemented correctly across platforms and people regularly rolling their own containers)