The author points out the extra complexity that C++'s programmable value semantics have added to the language without also mentioning the important benefits.

First, you can create a lot of objects on the stack, which avoids any dynamic allocation at all and is far, far faster.

Second, you can precisely control the layout in memory of your data structures. For example, you can represent a set of vertices in an OpenGL scene as a contiguous array of structs. This gives you much, much better cache performance and also makes it easy to hand data directly off to hardware components like graphics cards that need input in memory formatted in specific ways. In languages like Java you have to resort to awkward, inefficient hacks like FloatBuffers to do the same thing.