If big VC firms were losing money in terms of net total they wouldn’t exist. Albeit most of them define success as being acquired by a big company like Google. As for independent VCs most of them are probably wasting heaps of money and just following the hype.
C++ people still change. Normal people update their version when new ones come out and adapt their pratices to “Modern Idiomatic C++”. While a ton of C developers have been using C89 since the 90s.