There's a book about 101 ways to cut potatoes. Perhaps that could be a real mike-drop bit of evidence that we shouldn't be cooking potatoes.

This would be a valid argument if to read someone else's recipe you'd need to know every way of potato cutting they might use.

The problem with C++ isn't that you can't use it in a good way. The problem is that you can use it in a million different ways. The best way for your application is often not readily visible and reading someone else's code might be really difficult because they have a weird favourite way of doing things that you might not know.

Python does that quite well (it's got other failings, but in this regard it's good):

There's a class that's just called List and there's a literal that creates an instance of it: []. It's implemented using an array list, since that's the most sensible options for most list use cases. If you need another type of list, they are still available, but the default implementation is clearly visible and uses a sensible implementation.