90's C++ you mean, a decade before Java came to be, and responsible for famous books like GoF.
First of all they were extremely buggy back then, as anyone that actually used Stepanov's original implementation, from HP with docs hosted at SGI, will remember.
Secondly, Turbo Vision, OWL, VCL, MacApp, PowerPlant, Tools.h++, RogueWave Collection Classes, MFC, wxWidgets, Gtkmm, Qt, PÖET, COM/OLE/ActiveX, CORBA, Copland, BeOS predate Java, not the other way around.
It isn't writing C++ as Java, it is writing C++ as it was common between 1990 and 2011, before C++11 and other programming techniques took over in the C++ world, highly influenced by Andrei Alexandrescu's book "Modern C++ Design", published in 2001.
It is a book that plenty think it has Java in it, no it has Smalltalk and C++ and was published before Java came to be as you point out.
The decade was about the book publishing date, rather all the C++ frameworks that came to the market since CFront 2.0 was made available in 1989, and yes it was exactly 7 years, if being pedantic.