Funny, I too stopped using C++ around 2011. Recently I had to delve into Swift and learn it with great urgency... then my project changed direction toward C++ and Qt.

I find the '14 and '17 additions vastly improve C++ and in fact added things that I had just come to appreciate in Swift. So don't be too put off; learning the new stuff will help you if you need to adopt a more-recent language too.

> my skills have not aged well

I don't think that's necessarily the case. C++'s famed backwards compatibility, source of so many issues, is also a fabulous strength. There's nothing stopping one from writing C++03, while gradually adapting C++11 and beyond as time/circumstances permit (which is what I'm doing at my job, maintaining a massive legacy codebase while stymied by slow uptake on newer compilers by my corporate overlords...)

> It's no wonder 'senior' devs prefer to use plain C

Not this senior (in years, at least :)) dev. I've tasted RAII and I can't go back...

C is just easier to keep most of the rules in your head for. I prefer C any day, especially in an embedded system.

I used to maintain a couple of systems that between them were around 4 million lines of C++. Initially, in 2004, it would take about 16 hours to do a clean build. By the time I left that job, due to better hardware, precompiled headers and reduced dependencies, and smaller code for same functionality, clean build was down to 45 minutes.

The biggest winner, in my experience, was reducing dependencies in headers. Use forword declarations, etc. Precompiled headers helped a lot on Windows, but less so on Linux for the same code (but it still helped).

Incremental builds were fairly snappy, a minute or two (pretty good for a large C++ project).

I take it you haven't tried Swift ;)