alt Hacker NewsI don't think you're missing something. The standards committee made a bad call with "no submodules", ran into insurmountable problems, and doubled down on the bad call via partitions.
"Just one more level bro, I swear. One more".
I fully expect to sooner or later see a retcon on why really, two is the right number.
Yeah, I'm salty about this. "Submodules encourage dependency messes" is just trying to fix substandard engineering across many teams via enforcement of somewhat arbitrary rules. That has never worked in the history of programming. "The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language" is still true.
The C++ committee tries to do features with room for future extension. They believe that whatever you want from sub-modules is still possible in the future - but better to have a small (as if modules is small) thing now than try for perfects. We can argue about submodules once we have the easy cases working and hopefully better understand the actual limitations.