C++ bloated largely because they decided to make it bloated - they didn't had to, they just decided to shove in whatever new idea sounded good without much concern about the language's size.
But despite that i 100% guarantee you that people who actually use the language and have large codebases are really glad that C++ is backwards compatible and they do not have to waste time refactoring code that works.
> they just decided to shove in whatever new idea sounded good without much concern about the language's size.
Compared to most languages, C++ is very slow moving, but also very old.
> despite that i 100% guarantee you that people who actually use the language and have large codebases are really glad that C++ is backwards compatible
