> The C++ folks often don't know what they're missing out on.
This assumption implies that C++ developers are all one-track wonders that lock themselves in a basement and have no contact with any other programming language or tooling.
> But the tooling is just insanely cumbersome (...)
It really isn't. Node.js with npm or yarn is a far greater mess than anything that happened in C++.
I'd say that 9 out of 10 times people complain about the C++ ecosystem, they are actually talking from a place of ignorance and at best are only complaining about the mess they needlessly dug themselves into.
Case in point: who in their right mind feels the need to bolt on a different scripting language to cmake, a build system that only rarely needs a damn if statement in the project? These guys are clearly deeply invested in making their lives far hard and worse than they need to be. I mean, where's the need?
If anything, this wave of contrarian bullshit targeting C++ only shows the high volume of inexperient and clueless developers who decided to skip learning the basics and instead thought it was a good idea o dive head-first into wheels reinvented very poorly, and from there in proceed to depict their own mess as representative of everyone else's experience.