I can't speak about the ISO as a whole for engineering fields, but the ISO standardization process has worked out horribly for the C++ community. Not only for the issues Tim Sweeney points out, but the entire C++ standardization process is defacto a closed-off and secretive process where participation is limited to those who can physically travel from place to place and it's painfully obvious that the quality of features in C++ are much lower than what they could have been otherwise.
A common claim made by the ISO C++ committee regarding criticism of the language is that these guys are volunteers working in a mostly unpaid capacity on the language, and often have to hit tight deadlines to have any shot at getting a feature into the standard, and that's true exactly because of how arcane the ISO standardization process is. It's this pseudo-antagonistic process where maybe one or two individuals are tasked to "champion" a paper in front of their peers and then everyone is supposed to pretend that there's no politics involved and that the paper gets approved entirely on its technical merit.
C++ would have been much better served from ditching that and doing what Java, Python, and Rust do, have broad community feedback and input. It's hard to imagine what beneficial features are in C++ that would not still be there had there been involvement from the broader community of game developers, embedded device developers, desktop software developers and a host of people who use the language regularly, but it's clear many clumsy and awkward features would have been eliminated, including the now 50 ways of initializing variables, broken standard library features like std::variant, the now unusable std::regex, the minefield that is std::random, the upcoming bloated and error prone std::ranges, it's no wonder many C++ development teams are skeptical of the utility of the standard library and just roll their own alternatives.
I hope no other language goes down the road of using ISO to standardize its language.
> it's painfully obvious that the quality of features in C++ are much lower than what they could have been otherwise.
It's not obvious to me at all; in fact I'm more tempted to believe the opposite. C++ has its shortcomings, but when I (say) compare the C++ standard library against third-party libraries, I find the standard library design & implementations to be of much higher quality. They're often far more flexible and handle far more edge cases than open-source libraries do. So, while I would love for the C++ standard to be free, I think this would be more of an argument for not making it so.
And then of course there's boost [4], but people have very mixed opinions about it.
The reason a lot of developers use the standard library in C++ is because dependency management in C++ such a nightmare that many people writing a library are forced to use the standard if they want any hope of adoption even when far superior options exist. It's literally something people writing C++ libraries will advertise "Dependency free header only library!" because they know without that a lot of developers won't bother using it.
Anyways, I would be interested to know what part of the standard library you find is better than third party options.
[2] https://github.com/facebook/folly