I think that is a bit of an overstatement given the amount of legacy code and bindings generation capabilities. I do think it had to swing towards memory safe and C++ still didn’t have a plan for smart pointers much less move semantics when Swift dev started.

Who knows what present day Objective-C++ could have been if it had been the workhorse language of choice. Maybe this profiles thing Bjarne is pushing could have been in the roadmap. We will never know.