I think a lot of people find the learning curve of c++ fairly extreme, especially when considering the amount of knowledge to do idiomatic programming in c++ required to “do things elegantly.” C# and related languages tend to have idioms baked in closer to the syntax and grammar. My view of c++ after 30 years of it is it’s great if you’ve got 10 years experience programming it within a team of seasoned c++ programmers who shows you the ropes. Even then I think rust is the language I wished for all these years (albeit not for game dev yet). Finally, for the reasons rust isn’t great for game dev, c# and ilk generally have excellent reflective and dynamic natures making them sort of the sweatpants and old T-shirt language for game programming.

That said, it locks you into using stuff like mono and stuff for cross platform which makes me a sad.

Keep in mind that in addition to the "learning curve" arguments, there is also the functional developer ergonomics of things like live reload (where you can maintain memory state) that are simply not possible to do with C++ without heavy limitations or customized tooling.

Being able to fix a bug without resetting memory state is a huge ergonomic advantage in game development where generating the right memory state can be incredibly complex and depend on a ton of very specific and hard-to-reproduce factors. Not to mention recompiling and restarting a game can be incredibly slow.

Better is relative. And it's just a different type of tool. To be honest I know many more better engineers who primarily work with dotnet over CPP. The learning curve for CPP is higher because the ability to shoot yourself in the foot with CPP is higher. It's neither better or worse. Just a different tool in a toolbox.

Game devs want fast iterations above everything else, with performance being a close second. c++'s "toolchain" makes those iterations prohibitively impossible, even with decades of workarounds with hot reloading and extravagant methods to keep compilation times down.

If you're a AAA dev you give up a lot of that iteration because performance overtakes you, but there's little reason some indie 2d platformer will want to deal with even 30 second iteration times (which would be blazing quick for a AAA setup). C# is a mature, familiar environment for devs with similar syntax to C++ that can get decent performance as long as you maintain some discipline (for starters, no LINQ)

Define "better language". If you don't need performance then C# can make your life much easier.