There are good alternatives to C++: Rust and D. There is a number of languages with not quite as high but decent performance and varying expression power: Java, OCaml, Go, even Fortran for numerical stuff (not a joke; modern Fortran is quite advanced, and most likely runs faster then C++).

I see rather few reasons to start a new project in C++ in 2021, even though in some niches nothing else is viable, sadly.