I love how the first thing complained about was the use of C++ for the project. Compared to the lack of sane source control and release management, inexperience of the team, dozens of layers of abstraction, management bureaucracy, toxic culture, basic facilities like toilets being inoperative...
I think using C++ was literally the least of their concerns.
They also started, if I'm doing my arithmetic right, in 1996. Honestly, I could see C++ having been their best choice back then. Every language I would rather do a large project in is either newer than that or would have been pretty immature for a large project in the mid-90s.
I worked on a mega-LoC (millions of lines of code) C++ project in the late 90s. It wasn't even (to the extent I could honestly tell at that point in my career, anyway) a particularly hellish codebase or design, and suffered none of the madnesses described in The Fine Article.
(Of course, we were sub-sub-contractors working only on designated parts of the application. The stuff I did touch was consistently sane enough, though, that I don't think I'm too out of place in positing a legit minimal degree of not-terribleness across the rest of the project.)
My first job involved a 6 hour compile caused by that someone desperately had tried to beat a braindead homemade interpreted language into submission using a c preprocessor stage. Function calls where largely macro expansions...
All errors was reported as : syntax error on line 1. Fun times.
I think using C++ was literally the least of their concerns.