I think one difference is that this is usually abstracted to quite some degree. Most devs rarely (if ever) have to deal with C/C++ build systems, as package managers and whatnot deal with that.

For most people installing some C/C++ library it's just "apt-get install libfoo" (and maybe libfoo-dev), and they never have to deal with ninja/autotools/cmake/etc, whereas for JavaScript you directly have to deal with the tooling by using "npm install libfoo".

The same task mentioned in the article would probably be a lot easier: install package, write some code, "c++ -lfoo main.cpp".