Every time I've tried to dabble in C++ I've had the same horrible experience.

I end up "Randomly" stabbing at things until it works just well enough to get that particular thing done then dropping it all because it was such a painful experience.

Compared to something like cargo which works really well, C++ and it's build tools just feel flaky.

It may be that I'm just missing a mental model to get to grips with it, but no other major programming language is like that from my experience.