yeah, the c/c++ ecosystem never really had the benefit of a internet connected curated library community. afaik the first big example of that was perl in the late '90s. CPAN was awesome: here's this big library of awesome libraries that have been curated with full tests and documentation that you can search and add to your system with a few easy cli invocations. (for the uninitiated, this was npm or pip for perl in the 90s- complete with dedicate wikipedian level pedants gatekeeping/curating)

moreover, batteries included scripting languages like perl, python, matlab, etc all tend to have the benefit of having their core bits be best of breed. perl has/had one of the best re engines out there, matlab has a great blas all compiled with the best optimizing compiler and ready to go, python was more generic i suppose, with fairly strong libraries for most things (strings, io, network io, etc).

other than the microsoft nuget stuff, the c/c++ ecosystem never really had the benefit of anything like that other than boost which was pretty tough to pull into a given project and didn't really have the community of people writing high level libraries like the scripting languages did. that said, i often used to think it would have been interesting to build a language agnostic platform for language centered library communities. (a sort of generic cpan/pip/npm in a box for pulling down libraries and running tests for any language- a combination of build system, online community platform and search engine)

but the real moral of the story: use the libraries, luke/lucia! also, know them!