I don't mean to imply that writing a graph in C++ is impossible. It's clearly possible in modern C++. My contention is treating indicies-based management as so

I don't mean to imply that writing a graph in C++ is impossible. It's clearly possible in modern C++. My contention is treating indicies-based management as some tedious, manual workaround. Unity's ECS is written in C#, which has both a GC and the language expressiveness for an actual graph objects, but has adopted an indicies based system. It works, and is performant, so it isn't a mistake for the compiler to herd users down that path. In a similar vein, the Linux codebase is full of completely legitimate and readable uses of goto, but we are perfectly happy with languages that force us to use structured control flow.