There's a lot of overstated FUD about the moc. It's a preprocessor that expands a few macro strings into relatively simple boilerplate C++. Yes, it's a separate little preprocessor binary instead of using C++'s built-in macro system, but the concept itself is not foreign to C++.

The macro incantations aren't massively complicated and mostly are simple labels placed in header files; body code rarely uses anything moc-related these days.

Compared to the crazy stuff Microsoft has done over the years within and on top of C++ on their platform, Qt's moc is barely a footnote.

I respect not liking it, and I totally get the appeal of doing the same thing with tools built directly into the language (which to this day aren't fully comparable, and are mostly recent - check into the verdigris project for a solid and interesting take on attempting this), but it's a reasonably straight-forward approach to the problems it solves.