Well, one might grok C++ with the same perspective the author had, but I think C++, and especially C++17, make the language much safer and friendlier for beginners. C++17 for example is a big enough departure from pre C++11 days. If you stick to the bleeding edge, it doesn't look anything close to C at all.

Author has a point there, but maybe, just maybe, we won't see "new"s or "delete"s in most future codebases? (we have smart pointers now) Or non-intuitive macros (yay constexprs!)

I see these as stepping stones from C to where we are today without breaking everything at once or doing it with a whole other programming language.