I'm no C++ expert. But Wouldn't a private constructor and a static method that returns nil if input is bad fix this problem?

Joshua Kerievsky talks a bout this problem in his book [Refactoring to patterns](https://www.programmingbooks.dev/#refactoring-to-patterns), specifically the refactoring "Replace Constructors with Creation Methods"

That is maybe beside the point of the articles argument he is making about C++ being bloated and hard to use and read ¯\_(ツ)_/¯