In contrast it's really hard to make good C++ code intelligence features. For many many years Microsoft was the only one that had done it (as far as I know).
Most of us were using Xcode, but at some point I discovered CLion and it felt like a big step up. Having proper CMake integration instead of needing to regenerate Xcode projects really helped, plus I've often found Xcode to be quite unresponsive and never really liked the way it tries to be different with stuff like code navigation (recent versions seem to be better with how they handle tabs etc.)
But CLion is relatively recent. Quite possibly VS was the only IDE that did that stuff well for quite some time.
That said, your thesis about the relative difficulty of doing this for C++ vs Java seems hard to argue against, and the rapid, continuous growth in C++'s surface area and complexity since C++11 surely hasn't helped.