For what it’s worth, I treat C++ as C with a basket of goodies that you can use if it makes your code better (at least in the context of performance-sensitive stuff). Things like templates and classes can help if you don’t overuse them. STL is nice for rapid prototyping and writing tests. But I agree with you it’s often the case where people go overboard with the abstraction and cause an incoherent, slow, buggy mess

I worked on a C++ codebase that was essentially C with a few obvious domain classes and the addition of std::string and std::vector for convenience. I suspect that this is quite a common space, and it's immune to the march of the whizzy new features that are being added. Probably the only remotely modern bit of C++ that we could have benefited from is a salting of std::moves to remove some redundant copying, but this wasn't really worth the candle tbh.