Ah .. but I don’t know if they did! The implication that Pascal folks like complexity seems strange as Pascal is far simpler than C++ (not much larger than C) and C++ is no more type safe than C (both are less type safe than Pascal). Anyway I will stop now!
I was one of the people who happily left Pascal behind to move to C. But in retrospect, I think the computing world would've been better off with Pascal, modified slightly to allow passing variable-length arrays (like TurboPascal).
I never did make the move to C++ - I've written only a little code in it. Instead, when a lot of people were moving from C to C++ or Perl, I fished around and hit upon a little-known language called Python (OCaml was runner up). My management was practically nonexistent back then, so no one told me "No, use what everyone else is using!"