> Why would anyone choose C++ for their projects despite the production costs that it brings?

Familiarity, and all the libraries and tools available for C++. I see that D has a section on C++ interop,[0] but it looks about as painful as FFI usually is, and even more painful given how template-heavy C++ code tends to be.

(Completely unrelated: I can't mention FFI without also mentioning how amazing LuaJIT's C FFI is. The developer(s) really nailed it.)

[0]: https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html

I actually don’t think C++98 was that bad or complex. Yes nobody knew how to use it and wrote Java instead, but I think the hate comes from having code spanning so many different features and idioms that also require a compiler expert to understand.