I did not initially see the 'intro' in the title and it took me a while to understand why the author put so much energy on this (relatively) questionable aspect of c++.

On the article itself, I don't believe anyone sincerely consider C++ to be a good introductory language. It is dragged by a lot of low-level concerns which are only a dead-weight for a beginner. At this point of a programming cursus, the focus should be on understanding algorithms and low level details that can be useful in other contexts only serves to trip students.

As for the higher level of C++, such as everything object oriented, I believe it becomes and additional load on the understanding of the language(why are Strings initialized this way? How come I can call a function from a data type with the dot-notation, but functions I define can only be called by themselves?)

I find it to be also weird that String::length returns a type_t. The way I understood this type was that it represented a memory size. When we call length, we want the number of characters, independantly of the character size under the hood.