That’s totally true. In practice I think most effective C++ programmers, while still not knowing nearly everything there is to know, adopt the mindset of “if I

That’s totally true. In practice I think most effective C++ programmers, while still not knowing nearly everything there is to know, adopt the mindset of “if I follow these rules, avoid XYZ, and don’t get overly fancy, I can avoid aiming the gun at my foot”. I’d be warier about someone claiming to know all the C++ features without having a lot of experience maintaining it or running it at scale, than someone who claims to know less features but has maintained it and ran it at scale. It’s very much a language where you need to be humble about what you don’t know and careful about introducing things you don’t understand well. I think this “use what you know” is actually true in most languages including Java and Javascript, it’s just that the failure modes usually manifest as poor performance rather than unexpected semantics like in C++.