C++ is relatively fast but MSVC’s STL library’s debug performance is abysmal. It’s been like this since at least MSVC 2008 too. I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t think it’s a priority to improve.
If you want it to be as fast as other implementations, ask it to do less of this. They provide [_ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/standard-library/iterat...) for exactly that purpose. I think their choice of default (Debug means you want it to catch as many bugs as it can, and Release means it should be fast) is appropriate.
If they hadn't provided the knob to adjust this I'd agree they had a problem for some use-cases, but if you want the faster-but-less-thorough mode you just have to ask for it.
In a way it is comparable to the overhead of the sanitizers available in other compilers.
IIRC MS chose to enable it by default in debug mode as part of their effort of fortifying unsafe C and C++ code against security bugs, but of course it has a large penalty.
libstdc++ has a similar debug mode, but it is disabled by default, as, in addition to be more expensive, it also breaks the ABI.
If you want fast performance, you use a Release build. The purpose of a Debug build is that you can detect the source of as many bugs in your program as possible. So for Release build, it is a priority to improve performance (and in my opinion Microsoft did a good job). For the Debug build, it is a priority to improve the detectability of bugs in your program. Here also in my opinion Microsoft did a good job.