It's not _that_ complicated these days. structs, classes strings, vectors, hash maps, unique_ptr, references, non-owning pointers where it makes sense, basic templates. Boom. You also need basics like ownership, order of construction/destruction, value categories, move semantics, special member functions, RAII, etc. All the fancy perfect forwarding and template magic are wrapped up in libraries most don't need to think to hard about. Most people rarely write code that actually manages resource lifecycle directly. It's all wrapped up in RAII.

If you read the whole spec, it looks super complicated. But getting to a mental model that works in 99% of cases is not _that_ hard.