Just because C++ ships games doesn't make it pragmatic. Aren't many game codebases considered to be absolute hell? And none of that says anything about the pragmatism of functional-first languages.
C++ is indeed not C. C++ is a considerable improvement over C. You can stick with your C-style code and get the same result you'd get if you had used C, but you still have access to features that simplify a great deal your life and don't have a performance impact, like templates. With C++ you can have your C cake and eat the C++ cake too. The only drawback is compilation times, but any caching system takes care of that.
Nice fantasy, but the real-life codebases that do this make even the most hellish C++ code look like future space-age magic technology.
You're not speaking from real-world pragmatic (heh) experience here, you're just complaining that C++ is hard and that you'd rather go shopping.
Assume source is src/foo.c and compiled to obj/foo.o, then introduce a third directory called gen. Change the makefile rule to copy .c from src to gen, and compile from gen to obj. Then add a makefile rule that says gen/foo.c can be built from src/foo.c.py by calling python on the source and redirecting stout.
That means a C source file can be turned into a python program that generates the same source by wrapping it in a string literal, calling print and renaming the source file. No build system change. Then change the python as you see fit to work around the limitations of C.
Works really well for a solo developer. Repo using this scheme is ~100 generated files (mostly lua, some python) vs ~600 C files. Plus ~20 C++ and one D, just getting started with that language.
[1] https://github.com/JonChesterfield/boring-makefile/blob/mast...
$(GEN_PY_SOURCE): $(GEN_ROOT_DIR)%.c: $(SRC_ROOT_DIR)%.c.py
$(PYTHON) $^ > $@