I write code in C++ professionally and I do not see anything wild about that statement. It is very rare to start a new project in C++ outside of a few domains (

I write code in C++ professionally and I do not see anything wild about that statement. It is very rare to start a new project in C++ outside of a few domains (high-performance finance, game development). There are more and more "C++ successor" language projects started by people even from C++ committee. I see more and more very well known people from the C++ community starting to learn Rust. C++ is really unpleasant if you want to hop-in into some project. External dependencies (in most cases manually handled), various build systems (including custom ones - every project I worked on used a different build system!), various standards - ex. we have C++23 around the corner, and Fish has stayed on C++11. If you work in C++ you will stumble upon code from C++11 (or even earlier) to C++17. Learning C++ with intention to work in it means you need to basically know every standard released. I don't think anyone should learn C++ nowadays if they don't have too - the only exception is if you are really interested in the industry that mainly use C++ and it doesn't seem it will change.