C++98 should be forgotten as a bad dream. C++17 is almost a sane and convenient language (as long as you remember about the boiling depths into which you can fall if you're careless).
C++ will live for very long, like Fortran. And also like Fortran, there now must be a serious and uncommon reason to start a new project in it.
For instance, the much narrower circle of experts. Usually if you do need Fortran, it means you're going to run numerical code on a huge cluster with RAM in terabytes and cores in the thousands, so the developers you're looking for should understand parallelization very well (and how modern Fortran does it), know words like MPI and Slurm, etc. Beside that, knowledge of the common numerical methods and libraries is expected. This is a relatively unusual setup. Few job listings mention it.
If you just want some highly parallel numerical code, but a GPU with several tens of gigs of RAM would suffice, you just take Numpy, or PyTorch, or other such library, wrapped into Python. You suddenly have a wide circle of developers, plethora of references, and no lower chances to publish in a prestigious journal than if you'd taken Fortran :)
