My experience with C++ was when C++ was a relatively new thing. Practically the only notable feature provided by the standard library, was that unholy abuse of bit shift operators for I/O. No standard collections or any other data types.

And every compiler would consider something else a valid C++ code or interpret the same code differently.

I am little bit prejudiced since then… and that is probably where the author is coming from too.

Then things were just getting more complicated (templates and other new syntax quirks), to fill the holes in attempts to make C a 'high level language'.