Thankfully, you can still write C++ just fine without the "modern" stuff and have not only readable code, but also sane compile times. The notion, explicitly mentioned in the article, that all this insane verbosity also adds 5 seconds to your build for a single executor invocation is just crazy to me (it is far longer than my entire build for most projects).
It's not crazy, it's just what happens if you write mostly C with some conveniences where they actually make sense instead of "modern C++". I generally write very performance sensitive code, so it's naturally fairly low on abstraction, but usually most of my projects take between one and two seconds to build (that's a complete rebuild with a unity build, I don't do incremental builds). Those that involve CUDA take a bit longer because nvcc is very slow, but I generally build kernels separately (and in parallel) with the rest of the code and just link them together at the end.
Sure, C++ is heavy for compilation, there's simply more by the compiler to do, but code repository building under 5 seconds is at the very low end of tail so making the point about someone bearing with the 5 seconds longer build time is sort of moot.
I wrote a lot of plain C and a lot of C++ (cumulatively probably close to MLoC) and I can't remember any C code that would compile in such a short time unless it was a library code or some trivial example.
