"how much code" =/= how many developers.
the people who care about clock ticks should be the ones inconvenienced, not ordinary joes who are maintaining a FOSS package that is ultimately stuck by a 0-day. It still takes a swiss-cheese lineup to get there, for sure. but one of the holes in the cheese is C++'s default behavior, trying to optimize like it's 1994.
> the people who care about clock ticks
I mean that's pretty much the main reason for using c++ isn't it? Video games, real-time media processing, CPU ai inference, network middleware, embedded, desktop apps where you don't want startup time to take more than a few milliseconds...
No, it's not a dichotomy of having uninitialized data and fast startup or wait several milliseconds for a jvm or interpreter to load a gigabyte of heap allocated crap.
it's not about startup time. it's about computational bandwidth and latency once running.