Nice!
For me, slow progression is important to actually make the concepts “stick” in the brain, so do make sure to take your time in the journey, and not do the whole course in few days.
I would heavily reccommend to experiment with the code yourself, see it crash and error out and really get the “why” it works (not just how to do it in that case). For example, you can pass 3 parameters to a function?
Another great tip is to have a small project you are passionate about yourself: a card playing game (on the terminal, without graphics), an interesting math simulation, or a small program usable via terminal.
C++ is hard. If it’s too frustrating consider python for an easier introduction (there are no pointers there!), and you can still switch to c++ later. All mainstream programming languages work more or less the same, and the programming skills transfer very well between them!
Modern C++ changed a lot!
You are supposed to use shared_ptr (automatic reference counted pointer) and unique_ptr(statically checked unique pointer) and not create raw C-style pointers anymore. It still has a lot of weird niche cases that need to be avoided, but memory management is definitely much easier, so in many ways it’s safer at runtime than C, while being still much more obscure than C.
I still agree with you that a more modern language would be even better, especially for learning!