There are other rarely-used C+±like languages that fit your criteria, and they basically all aim to eliminate the kind of thing I was talking about. If someone was used to one of those and tried picking up C++ for the first time, they’d probably end up with working, but unnecessarily slow C++, having assumed the compiler would do a bunch of things for them that it actually wouldn’t.

The popular low-level systems programming languages that aren’t C++ are C and Rust. Neither is object-oriented. C programmers forced to use C++ tend to basically write C with a smattering of features that make it not compile with a C compiler, and produce a horror show that brings out the worst of both languages and looks nothing like C++ a C++ programmer would write, then write a blog post about how terrible C++ is because when they tried using it like C, it wasn’t as good at being C as C was. Rust programmers generally have past experience with C++, so tend to know how to use it properly, even if they hate the experience.