That's only really true for solo projects. For example I worked in a company on a C++ SDK for a while and it was written by one of those clever people who has zero taste in software development and thinks you have to use GoF patterns everywhere. The god object was a CRTP inheriting from about 20 templated base classes.

I spent about a year trying to sort out that mess and then quit.

To be clear I would still always pick C++ over C because C makes simple stuff (strings and containers mainly) waaaay more painful than they should be. But I also don't really agree with the "C++ is simple - just don't use the complex bits!" argument.

Anyway it's kind of academic now because 99% of the time Zig is an obviously better choice than C and Rust is an obviously better choice than C++.