Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'goldilocks moment', but I think C++11 was it. Ever since then, the language has had a nice balance of high level abstractions at low level performance. (Theoretically it actually got faster due to move semantics)
The parent was asking the goldilocks question -- was there ever a point where C++ was not too complex like modern C++, e.g. this {} issue, but had enough features (contrast with C, which doesn't have enough features for many applications). I don't think there was such a moment. Apparently move constructors were a de-optimization in the case of std::vector. As far as I remember, it's related to iterator invalidation a…
I thought that moving is optional in a sense, and the compiler could decide to copy instead of move (?)