This is how we used to write C++ twenty years ago. I used to maintain about 100,000 LOC and I never felt this was an additional cognitive load. In fact, it was

This is how we used to write C++ twenty years ago. I used to maintain about 100,000 LOC and I never felt this was an additional cognitive load. In fact, it was beneficial to have the sequence of code always mirroring the sequence of execution (loops and conditionals notwithstanding). Syntactic sugar built into the language was never a priority (at least where I worked). Whatever abstractions we needed, we achieved through classes and operator overloading.