Its not too clever for its own good, its programmers that are too clever for C, and desperately need basic features, and its the only way to get them unless you switch language.

Its also surreally poorly designed, encouraging worse habits than C itself. Avoiding definition collisions and lack of namespaces alone make it horrific for any moderate sized project and up. Combine that with the near complete lack of static analysis tools, and its a recipe for disaster.