You are not alone. many on the standard committee are trying to get rid of it. std::print is the new way to do io instead of cout in part so you don't have to abuse shift for io. This is new in c++23 though so few people know about it.

Bjarne appears to prefer cout though, so it isn't universal.

Danish Bjarne may have his < right next to lshift. He needs to use shift+. to enter colon.

On US layout colon is a single keypress but < is shift+.

This may explain the discrepancy.

—- from someone who read Bjarne at 16yo. All hail the Bjarne