> You can implement new types whose behavior is fully controlled by yourself.

Exactly, that's what I do. Now notice that there is not a good incremental way to go from this object model stuff, to a toolbox that lets you build many more routines out of reusable primitives (implemented mostly as POD structs and freestanding functions). It becomes worse if one has also made a lot of use of these silly access protectors, public/protected/private.

Which means that, when you start out with the C++ object model, and evolve the codebase, you are invariably going to paint yourself into a corner, and proceeding requires first undoing all the fluffy object stuff.

That's not some furious ranting disconnected from reality on my end. I've seen it many times in practice. Show me any large complex serious systems codebase that makes extensive use of that silly implicit stuff, where all the important function calls are basically out of your control, hidden in the "whitespace"... no, that's not the way to write a complex program. It doesn't work.

For balance, I concede that even large programs can use some self-contained container types, like std::vector, or even custom built ones. That's where the object model still works -- small, isolated stuff. However, as you scale, you tend to not include many isolated types. You program probably needs a good grip of memory allocation for example.

Some of the worst code (codebases) you will see is C++ code written by people who are new to the language and think that it is the right thing to do, or just cool, to use every feature of the language.

C++ is a massive language, that has really grown too big, and is fraying at the edges. This is probably the fate of any old language - it either keeps growing adding more modern features, or it stops growing and becomes obsolete. It's hard to always add new features while retaining backwards compatibility, but backwards compatibility is what users demand, so the result is languages like C++ that are screaming for the feature set to be refactored and simplified...

Using C++ well is requires knowing when it's appropriate, or not appropriate, to use the features it provides!