And then you have to handle all the subtle memory bugs that you've introduced by doing that.
> While programming in Rust, I've never thought to myself, "man, this would be so much easier to express in C++".
This is a concrete example of something that is much easier to express in C++. And, sure, you do pay the tax for that (although I will also dispute the notion that it is impossible to write C++ without memory bugs; it's just hard).
People think C++ is expressive because they think they are allowed to do a lot of things that they aren't, in fact, allowed to do in C++.