It's less powerful, but also orders of magnitude less bloated and faster. OSMAnd has that quintessential kitchen-sink application feeling where features is the main concern and cohesive design an afterthought.
There's plenty of one-time cases where you don't want to declare an entire class but still enjoy scope-based functions. However, the approach in the post is not very C++-esque, I like this one much more:
https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/blob/master/src/utils.hh#L5...