The problems I am guessing start when you are tempted into using the rest of the features one by one. You have generics. Well next let's get inheritance in. Now a bit of operator overloading. Then dealing with all kinds of smart pointers...
If you can say I will only use features A, X an Z of C++ and some how enforce it then you are mitigating a lot of the risk. IIRC Carbon (Google's new lang to migrate their code off C++) came about because they themselves used C++ in a very bounded way (I recall a lot of the templates they created for their use of C++ actually resembled how Go code looked like and may have been one of the reasons for creating Go). But I am not sure how many mere mortals have that kind of tooling and discipline to limit themselves?