Reflection proposals have been around at least since 2014, so I'd say it's exactly right to say that C++ fears it — otherwise it'd have arrived much sooner.
It was only 10 years between getting rid of concepts and getting the replacement in.
They got rid of "good concepts" because when attempts were made to implement them the build for a simple "hello world" was over 15 hours and the implementers didn't think they could optimize that enough to have acceptable build times. As such I wouldn't call what they got rid of good concepts - to be good it needs to be nice not just in an academic paper, but also in the real world.
So is the fate of design by committee languages and APIs, where not always the best comes out, rather what the people that decided to show up voted on, and those hard enough to keep battling for their papers throughout all voting sessions until the final victory.
