No; OOP, metaprogramming, exceptions, etc were sort of new in early 1990s in an efficiently compiled language, so C++ was paving its part of way, in an awkward manner, trying hard to make abstractions zero-cost. (I mean mainstream; Common Lisp had all these for a long time, and in an elegant way, but the cost is non-zero.)

Equally, Perl explicitly tried a number of syntactic ways to do something; some stuck as good ideas, some were demonstrated to be... less good. I think it was important to explore and show that a particular approach has serious downsides in practice, but it's not necessary to stick to in once better alternatives are available.