C++ compiler errors back in C++99/01 days weren't usually so bad unless you were doing basic code and not some SFINAE shit. Increased boost usage and C++11 introduced var-arg templates and a lot of other things that made things explode.
Today we've removed a lot of SFINAE magic since if-constexpr that is easier to read/trace and also the existence of CONCEPTS to pre-constrain to compatible types and thus avoiding implementation details from becoming the error.
True, on the other hand writing portable code was a mess, even if we constrained ourselves to UNIX world, as each vendor compiler supported a different flavour of the standard.
I had some fun between HP-UX aC, AIX xlC, Solaris cc, and Red-Hat gcc, and naturally there was MSVC as well.
We had #ifdefs in place for prototypes, because the version of the aC compiler we had on our development server still only supported K&R C function definitions.