Modern C++ has many tricks to get memory and thread safety pinned down, but in my experience the new capabilities are entirely subsumed by old code. If Bjarne wants C++ to be a language worth choosing, we need some options to remove all of the footguns from before c++11, and remove the redundancies with partially-well-done new features to yield a single-well-done way of handling memory and multithreading.

If Bjarne put something akin to Rust's Editions in C++, and regularly removed poor designs, then yes C++ would be pretty close to Rust for new projects.