I think in Scott Meyers case it is he basically never used C++ in production, which in some sense is ok, since he makes his living as a language expert, but sometimes this shines through; also from a D conference talk I remember, even he got sick of it and switched to D.

Also let me use this comment to recommand John Lakos, his talks, his books. He knows how to build large scale applications and if you saw his talk on the 'is_working_day' function (if I remember correctly) you know you were not overthinking.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll have a look at his work, for sure.

Also I'd be curious to see that talk you mention, do you remember anything about it that could help in searching for it?

I think same talk but different recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZUJsCh1wOY I think around 1:08:30 onwards (maybe even before) the example I had in mind.

For me, that disillusion has been one of several steps.

Scott Meyers book was one point.

Then I started to learn Clojure, motivated by the idea that we need better concepts for the upcoming massively parallel hardware (a big influence for me was the article "The free lunch is over" by Herb Sutter: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm). I now think that immutability by default is clearly the better way to go, even in close-to-the machine applications like embedded devices and industrial control applications.

Then, I saw this article on the different options and syntax for initializing variables in modern C++: http://mikelui.io/2019/01/03/seriously-bonkers.html

And I was like, no, this can't be serious. I think this was the point where I began to distance from the language (though I still use it at work when I need to).

I got also the impression that the actual language use in C++ is undergoing a serious split. Compare the C++ core guidelines with Google's C++ style guide:

https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

This does already look somewhat like different languages, only that they can be compiled with the same compiler.

And then, the C++17 and C++20 standard iterations, at this point it is just like "this is too much! What is this good for?"