I agree that C++11 was a big step. This was around the time I was working on a master's thesis, building a distributed optimization framework based around simulated annealing, using hand-optimized CUDA kernels on Nvidia CPUs. Writing CUDA code became a much nicer experience with C++11, and I didn't hate it.

However, it was still a bad choice for all the plumbing, caching, networking, job-management, etc that a useful framework needed, and I started using more and more Python. C++ was frustrating for those bits.

Eventually, after some important work on Numba[0], I was able to replace C++ completely, even for the CUDA kernels, and just write a subset of Python. It wasn't without it's (often quite esoteric) problems, but I was happy to throw out the last bits of C++ code. The thesis was praised and had some outside attention, but fizzled out in the years thereafter.

0: https://numba.pydata.org/