People used to compare it as simpler than Rust. I don't agree that it's simple anymore at all.
None of this is meant to be badmouthing or insulting. I'm a polyglot but love simple languages and syntaxes, so I tend to overly notice such things.
I tend to fall into the former camp. Something like BF would be the ultimate simple language, even if not particularly useful.
a few things have been removed, too. and async/suspend/nosuspend/await, usingnamesplace are headed for the woodchipper.
And I don't see "crates using nightly features" as somehow a language complexity. Are we counting "Three different compilers with their own quirks" as a C++ complexity? Nor is the six week cadence a complexity. When naked functions stabilized a handful of people went "Hooray" and nearly everybody else doesn't care. And that's not even a feature in standard C++. You have to go read your vendor instructions and do it separately each time. "Yay!".
The ecosystem is part of what means to use a specific language, though.
Yeah, having to guess what standards and extensions each C and C++ compiler implement, is also an issue with them, and will eventually come to Rust as implementations eventually come up, originally there was only CFront and UNIX System V compilers.