I think the OP is not complaining about change. Arguably, change is inevitable. He seems to dislike trying to keep backwards compatibility at the cost of sanity

I think the OP is not complaining about change. Arguably, change is inevitable. He seems to dislike trying to keep backwards compatibility at the cost of sanity and usability, and the fact that C++ is an ever-growing pile of features that doesn't make sense anymore. This is precisely what the Rust edition are there to solve: your legacy code will work but the language will change with each edition to reflect the state of the art, and if needed, it will break backwards compatibility.