In my own ranking of favourite programming languages C is at the first place. C++ comes in last. I personally hate it when people write C/C++ as if it's the very same thing. I'm quite sure there's more like me out there. :)

Interestingly Perl comes in second, even I use it rarely (aka not at all) these days. But that's a slightly off-topic side note. :)

Perl is just C with less type safety.

And yes, for the most part. C++ as simple shorthand for struct-attached functions and automatic memory management (no, not smart pointers; RAAI) is good. Every single thing added after that is misery and should push a modern developer to Rust, Go, or Zig (roughly in that order) where such things are implemented sanely or not at all.

For me, C++ is always in first place. It allows me to do high-level abstractions to low-level hijinks all with total control (i.e. zero-cost abstractions, Templates for compile time programming etc.) across all levels of the software stack and the full spectrum of available hardware.

Furthermore, any C++ programmer who says they do not know C, knows neither C nor C++ (hence my preference in using C/C++ as a shorthand to encompass both and highlight the dependency of the latter on the former). I often see this in novice C++ programmers who started with "Modern C++" and identify it as something like Java/C# because of the now huge set of standard libraries and copious syntactic sugar which only compounds their confusion further.