The backtrace -- as in, just the output from running `bt` in GDB -- was over a thousand wrapped lines long. There were ~5 stack frames that took up over a hundred lines of console each to print just the function name. That product's debug builds recently hit the 2GB line, which is enough that old versions of binutils complain.
I don't know what the solution is. There's some really neat stuff you can do with template metaprogramming, and in stripped release builds it compiles down extremely tiny. Plus the code is very clean to read. But it does feel like there isn't any kind of central vision for the C++ debugging experience, and bad interactions between highly-complex modern C++ libraries, the compiler, and the debugger are probably only going to get worse unless somebody (the ISO committee? vendors? every single library author individually?) thinks really hard about debugging support.