I wouldn't agree at all. I think that for all its worts, Java is a fundamentally simpler language than C++ (well, basically every language in any kind of use is fundamentally simpler than C++).

With the exception of generics a long time ago, Java hasn't really added any major language - changing features. Stuff like lambdas, try-with-resources, even annotations, are only minor quality of life improvements to things people were already doing. Project Loom (fibers) and value types will probably be the largest additions to the language in its history, we'll see how they pan out.

By contrast, C++ has several ways of doing absolutely anything - 4 kinds of pointers (pointers, references, r-value references, unique/shared pointers), 3 ways of creating functions (top-level, functor, lambdas), 3 ways of initializing objects (construcor, copy assignment, initializer list), and on and on. A variable in C++ is characterized by a type, const-ness, volatile-ness, mutability (if it's a field), being a value, reference or rvalue reference, visibility (if it's a field of a class), and probably others that I'm missing right now.

> I think most of C++'s additions have avoided these problems in the way Java ran into.

I strongly disagree.

C++ is a giant, warty bag of cats with wires hanging out everywhere. It's so bad, and so arbitrary, that many institutions I know of don't permit their teams to program in C++ per se, but rather in a strict house subset of C++. That is a bad sign for a language.

This is not the situation Java is in yet. You can hate many of the language features added to Java recently (I certainly do). But it's completely plausible to know all of them, and more or less know all of their implications. This is just impossible in C++, full stop.