Finally, after 40 years technology has advanced far enough for C++ to have a print function instead of cout

It always had printf: https://cplusplus.com/reference/cstdio/printf/

Edit: It's almost like the whole world got a lot of work done with the tools they already had.

It had C's printf, which means it isn't type safe, which is consequently a terrible primitive for this work. Like, it makes sense in C, which thinks boolean is a fancy new concept and thinks 0-terminated strings are a good idea, but it's not actually good.

std::println is more or less what you would obviously build for a modern language and it's notable because C++ could have provided something pretty similar even in C++ 98, and something eerily similar in C++ 11 but it chose not to.

I think you'll find implementing a type-safe print function in C++11 very challenging. What you could do in constexpr was very limited, type deduction was less powerful, and it didn't have fold expressions. I'd say this really only became feasible since C++17.

Sure, a hypothetical C++ 11 equivalent would e.g. probably not be able to do the trick where we reject bogus formats at compile time, which is something programmers want and which Rust only gets to do by making this a fancy macro whereas C++ 23 is doing it in the actual library code.