Perhaps his issue was previous C++ versions? Just a shot in the dark since I am not informed in detail.
Take some vintage C++ code from late nineties, like games, and there's no concept of ownership, before smart pointers and move, and full of global's everywhere.
It was also when code were transitioning for a multi-threading era, so using the same code style of the previous sequential era was really bad.
Of course, all the new features C++ gained since '98 only make the language more useful for coding large, long-lived systems, as is amply demonstrated in the tens or hundreds of billions of lines of C++ code implementing exactly those systems. Rust's adoption of so many of those same features increases its usefulness for a growing number of those same purposes.