I would use it for something like the Unreal game engine, because I know that:
- performance is important in much of the project
- the problem is complex enough to require high level language constructs
But for most tasks, my time would be better spent using a high-level language and then optimising the hot spots in, say, C.
At scale this always becomes true. C++ can be written with reference counting and other high level concepts with runtime penalties. When you need to optimize or scale, you will never need to look to another language. I do a lot of numerical computing in Python and often need to drop into Cython or C; in C++ this wouldn't need to happen. One the the main goals of C++ is that "there is no language below C++".
High level language constructs are always nice, and C++ has a lot of "zero-cost" abstractions, meaning you only pay for what you need. For example, an iterator in C++ can just be a raw pointer in the case of iterating over a vector, but it is more complicated for a std::map because it is backed by a tree. C++ is a high-level language, so I don't understand the argument that you would be better off splitting your stack between the "important" parts and the slow parts.