Prima facie C was created as a portable assembly language that very nearly reflected the underlying hardware. Then C++ added new abstraction mechanisms on top of C, that were at first totally orthogonal: just classes and templates. One could still use all of C to get at the raw machine (raw pointers and peeking/poking). Then as abstraction envy grew to overcome C++, as it does every active language in time, C++ drifted farther and farther from its system-y roots. Fine.
But in my day job, the only real reason to use C++ is because it's the only realistic choice as a systems language. I need to peek and poke memory, jump to raw machine code I've generated at runtime. This doesn't make me better or worse, it's just my use case (a virtual machine). As C++ becomes less and less capable of doing these low-level unsafe things (because too many people caused too much damage attempting this), and adds more ceremony to the old ways of peeking and poking memory, it becomes less useful to me. Who is it useful for?
I'd argue that C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world where it believes it's a beautiful language full of nice, solid abstractions. But IMO it isn't--probably can't be--as all the abstractions break down, leaving us in the lurch, with neither good systems programming support nor good application-level abstraction.