A lot of people who have written and maintain large C++ code bases will tell you straight up that they prefer C to C++.

Perhaps that's the problem right there. As someone who has written a lot of C++ for quite some time, the most nightmarish aspect tends to be working with antique codebases.

The way people program in it has changed drastically over the last ten or so years. It's possible to have a reasonably painless experience with modern C++ that is pretty much impossible with codebases with significant history.

A lot of that is because the compiler support simply wasn't mature enough, so people did what they had to do to ship. If all you're dealing with is old C++ code, it's extremely easy to find that you prefer coding in C rather than C++ (which is almost what that old code really is).