Struct was already a feature in Jovial in 1958, but I digress.
Plenty of very hard 1970's features at Bell Labs, weren't a problem at IBM, DEC, Xerox, Olivetti,....
As for the way C compatibility taints C++, I agree, however Bjarne made juice with the lemons he had, and if it is to do a Python 3 in the C++ world, then most would rather migrate to Rust than use such C incompatible C++.