problem is that the language started hitting its stride and getting attention while the core team is on a 2 year side quest of rewriting the compiler + incremental compilation
it's a pretty narrow set of people that want or need to be able to memorize and recall a bunch of facts as efficiently as possible. mostly med school students and language learners, where this stuff obviously works.
it's doable I guess. I think it's more productive to learn a concept and be able to derive everything about the concept from first principles instead though
no idea why it was done, but iirc people still wrote it until gurus started emphasizing that you shouldn't around c++11. around that time there was a strong push to differentiate code from looking like "C with classes"