i think what happened was that turbo vision, owl, mfc, etc., were mostly for line of business applications: work order tracking, mail merge databases, hotel reservations, inventory management, whatever. but since the late 90s those have moved to visual basic, perl, java, microsoft java, python, and js. only the people who really needed c++'s performance (and predictable memory footprint) kept using c++, and similarly for c

maybe as the center of gravity moves from people writing game engines and kernels to people keeping legacy code running we will get more of a constituency for bounds checking

agreed about asm being safer