Are template-related errors also better? I remember being deathly afraid of messing up something that uses std::string because I would just get back pages and pages of errors (or pages and pages of a single error).
I sure hope so. C++ templates are the worst thing ever for debuggability. And all the most useful C++ containers etc are templates. That's the Achilles heel of C++.
Somewhat. You still get error novels, but anecdotally, it seems like the error messages are more likely to identify the important details first before giving you all the information you might possibly want.