that's why c++ gets bullied

Yeah, just to say it more clearly: that kind of thing is why lots of people out there insist that operator overloading is a bad idea.

And yeah, it's a C++ thing that mostly doesn't happen in other languages.

Yes. Sometimes you're limited by the hardware you're controlling. This code is a bit hard to justify with that excuse though. Normally your code would do a read from hardware to see if the value decremented and then repeat the write. (Possibly a sleep/yield in there if required.)