Nobody is forcing you to use the old stuff. You can stick to the new nice bits and mostly just ignore the fact that the old crud exists in the language.

Unless you use libraries which are written in different styles, and have to read / fix them. Then you still have to remember / understand all the complexity.

But in that case you are in no position to give up on C++ anyway, as your grandparent commenter did.

Sadly that is only true for the code that is under our control, which is seldom the case in most companies.

What a wonderful world would it be… Not being forced to used legacy C++ style. Not being forced to mind the undefined minefield. Not being forced to even use C++ in the many many cases where garbage collection is obviously fine…

Sadly these days, I'm not paid to "solve problems". I'm paid to solve them in C++ —sometimes for good reasons.

That only works if you're on a one-man project where you use the STL and implement everything else from scratch.