C++ as a language is truly a mess. But as far as a niche it has a pretty unique offering, even today.

My background is games and I've been heavily in Unreal lately. The language feels modern enough with smart pointers and such. Their standard library equivalent is solid.

The macros still feel very hacky and, ironically, Unreal actually does its own prepass over the source to parse for certain macros.... kind of shows that it's not a good language feature if that's needed. BUT the syntax used fits right into the language, so it feels idiomatic enough.

Templates are as powerful as they are just a mess to read.

Does anything come close to the speed and flexibility of the language? I think the biggest reason C++ sticks around is momentum but beyond that nothing _really_ replaces the messy but performance critical nature of it.