Here's a poignant anecdote. At one point while working on HHVM at Facebook I finally snapped, spent 2-3 days doing nothing but optimizing the build system to speed up trivial incremental compilation (e.g. a whitespace change). My efforts resulted in... 24 seconds best case. I spent years on that project pipelining my coding, that is, making a small change, asynchronously launching a build, fixing issues from the previous build attempt, ad nauseam, and the pipelining was oftentimes 3+ deep due to latency. That cognitive load severely impacted productivity.
That said, I agree that C++ has a lot of other terrible problems too!