>>7
Not sure what "next steps" are. Probably because it's so widely-used in industry, I always thought C++ was reactionary, e.g. the Core Guidelines could be just a response to Rust's popularity.
Modern C++ design style has really gone away from the OO stuff and more towards functional, with lambdas, iterators, the STL algorithms, etc. You can always just play around with simple stuff to start--there's a good book "Accelerated C++" by Koenig and Moo which is a bit old, but gives a good foundation. And after finishing that you'd know enough to catch up to C++20 & Core Guidelines by yourself.
I wouldn't call it a vendetta, but there is a risk to using Rust. I work in a diverse company, some of my colleagues although staying within the law hold fairly National Socialist or Fascist opinions. This could mean that you are blacklisted and get no support from the Rust maintainers.
Human lifespan is finite, so I'm trying to limit learning new languages for personal interest to those with something like an ISO standard. Haven't looked at Zig & Odin, but have learned some Go (for money) and Rust (since it has a brand-new language spec). Totally up to yourself if it's only for hobby reasons, and no money.
If it's only for fun, fire away with developing both a game and an engine (C++ & Lua are definitely still the most popular languages in this domain). But I've heard if you want to actually finish anything, you need to pick either the engine or the game.