With C, you need to carefully craft your own gun with just iron ingots and a hammer. You will shoot yourself in the foot, but at least you'll have the knowledge that it was your craftsmanship that led to it.
With C++, there are already prebuilt guns and tons of modifications that you can combine at will. If you shove it in the right way, you can make a flintlock shoot a 50 cal, but don't complain when your whole leg gets obliterated.
It is indeed a trope and a mostly false one - C++ introduces more dramatic ways to footgun yourself but a plethora of tools to make it easier to avoid them - in particular the built in library functions actually encourage good C++ programming practices...
Learning about reflog was a game changer. Now I’m never afraid of breaking my branch. If I mess up, I can always git reset —hard to a previous state.
Another game changer was learning that a perfectly valid way of doing squash is to do git reset to an earlier commit and then do git commit -a. Saves a lot of rebasing headache.