With the right tooling, I find it a lot more productive than the C++98 I learned in early university. A lot of memory management patterns are easier to write/maintain, and more fine-grained tuning for performance is still available to you if necessary.
Bjarne Stroustrup writes "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." and I think I can see elements of that language in newer and newer editions. It's nice to have both the new and the old in the same toolset, although sometimes I look at Rust and I think "this might be better in a newer manual-memory language".
