17 is worth it for std::filesystem alone. It also has optional and variant.
Optional is nice but slightly awkward in a non-garbage collected language.
IMO variant is one of those things that should not exist in standard.
It tries to implement discriminated union in C++ but that feature is lame without true pattern matching. And you can’t implement pattern matching without thorough syntax level support. So in my books it’s in this academic “let’s pretend a while we are using some other language…” category.
It’s _occassionally_ convenient for sure.
I agree, they should have made it a language/syntax feature. However: if you wanna do a sum type, it does do that. I'd rather have that than nothing.
IMO the C++ standard should focus platform-agnostic functionality and leave the nitty gritty platform interaction to standalone libraries that can be patched and/or replaced as needed.