Not only was there no consensus, reports from the process described the behavior from contracts proponents in WG21 as political maneuvering and trying to ignore criticism by pretending that somehow consensus was not a goal and thus they could simply nominwlly reject and ignore any criticism.

There's a lot of personal attacks directed at Stroustrup but somehow it's left out of the story the fact that Microsoft apparently criticised the proposal as unimplementable. We're talking about feedback from the dominant compiler vendor.