C++ is still used extensively, even for completely new projects, in computer graphics, databases, etc. Relatively new projects I’ve seen it used: TileDB, tensorstore, core Apache Arrow, etc. CUDA programming is C++ at the bleeding edge. I’m in the process of updating my C++ to C++17 and there’s definitely been a lot of changes over time in the language. I would agree that for many, they’d go with python and let others accelerate that python with underlying C/C++ they wouldn’t have to see.