As long as you limit yourself to a subset of modern C++, it’s actually a decent language. Less guardrails than Rust, but more syntactic sugar (think overloading, default parameters, implicit this, implicit reference-taking, implicit conversions). You could argue those are anti-features, but even as someone who really likes Rust, I gotta admit C++ is occasionally more ergonomic.
Having the ability to overload functions or constructors without a million
Stuff::with_x
variants is something I consider more ergonomic and not unsafe. I know the Rust community prefers explicitness in many places, but explicitness and safety are somewhat orthogonal in language design. I consider e.g. Swift to be a safe and ergonomic/sugared language, that borrows, no pun intended, a lot of ideas from Rust