> This feels a little defensive, but also pretty out of line with the philosophy of the C++ standards committee. The committee has been aggressively stapling every new leg they could find to that dog for decades. They just chose not to staple this particular leg on until now.

Your comment doesn't bear any resemblance with reality. C++ started with a spartan standard library and only recently did it standardized it's file system API.

Compare that with what, say, POCO already offers. Or Boost. Or java/C#/Python/etc.

What exactly led you to believe that absurdity?