The tooling is improving. It's so much better than it was. With CLion I have a modern refactoring IDE of excellent quality (just don't try to use it with large code bases like Chromium, though, ahem). Build systems have improved remarkably. We have two excellent open source compilers.

I actually enjoy working in modern C++ much more than I did in Java, which I did professionally for almost 10 years before this.

I like the idea of Rust, and followed it since the earliest days when Graydon proposed it. I like the syntax and the tooling. But every time I begin a project in it, the cognitive overhead of the memory safety features just throws me a loop. I have no doubt if I were to dig into a large and established code base using it it would click within a few days, but starting on my own... I lose focus quickly.

I do like Zig, though. It is a very nice C++ alternative.