Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (...) such as Google's famous "no exceptions". If I recall correctly, Google's rationale regarding exceptions is that their legacy code is not exception-safe, and so they were faced with the choice of either rewriting critical parts of their legacy code to handle exceptions, or don't use them. Also, their "no exceptions" rule only applied to work involving their legacy code. I'm too lazy to find the source, but tha…
Indeed the details matter, but my example was just designed to be something that might be somewhat more recognizable than those situations and restrictions I've encountered personally.
If your goal was to use that poor example to support the idea that people stick with subsets of C++ because of reasons, that example failed to support the assertion. Thus it makes no sense to stick with a patently wrong observation just because it's easier to recall.
Getting back to the topic, as far as I know there are only two features of C++ which are up for debate regarding their adoption: exceptions, and template metaprogramming. The exception-handling debate only makes sense in very low-level applications and refactoring legacy exception-less code, which in practice is not anyone's case. The template metaprogramming debate typically boils down to YAGNI and the need to avoid resume-driven development. Nevertheless, both features are used extensively, whether directly or indirectly (see STL), and in general there is no reason to bother debating whether people should use it or not, unless you have very specific requirements in mind (I.e., avoid generating magical code in embedded applications, or in very high performance applications where you feel you need tight control over everything down to which instructions are generated).