RAII and scope based construction/destruction is actually quite nice.
This is a problem with vocabulary types. C tends to do a good job of providing them. C++ tends not to, though there has been some progress in the standard lately in defining classes like unique_ptr and string_view.
C tends to fall down by providing raw memory (an int and a char) to represent fairly subtle relationships (the int represents the size of the string pointed to by the char... what happens when the int is negative?). So C libraries don't 'reinvent the whole stack', but this sort of bookkeeping logic tends to cause bugs (at least security bugs).