I am both a Python programmer and a C++ programmer. I have programmed professionally full time in one or the other for years at a time. I think C++ is now a much better language than when I learnt it first (cfront). In particular C++11 really fixed a lot of the memory issues with shared_ptr and std:: algorithms. It is a better language now if you are doing anything larger than then a program that takes more than a few weeks to write. On the other hand, I love python for everything else and some of the new stuff is great but making a new way to print strings over and over tells me some people have too much spare time or not enough real work to do. In my opinion formatting a string to print a debug statement should be as concise as possible whereas a lot of these fancier formatting systems are better suited to stuff that ends up staying for use by other people. Luckily there are ways to use ye olde printf style formatters in both for those times.

No, the claim is that it's ordinary and just part of the way the world works.

Good point. I think it should be rephrased in basis of personal familiarity: people who learned C++ before they were 15 indeed think that it's simple and elegant.