Yep, in my line of work I deal with technologies in which an AST cannot be built by the text editor. LLVM is making life easier (and there do exist plugins to leverage that). You need smarter tools than what Eclipse provides to perform an automatic refactor of many languages.
That said, working on text for 99% of refactors is actually no problem. If you have *really* fsked up and need to do a program wide refactor then you probably have bigger problems haha.
You can refactor your code but you will still need to manually fix the diagrams, unit tests and everything else.
Intellisense, autoformatting, refactoring and automatic code completion are all very overrated in my opinion. Getting away from them is liberating. Developers are starting to realise this which is why the lightweight "Visual Studio Code" is now more popular than the fat bloated "Visual Studio 2017".
But you can easily experience what I mean by downloading a large project (i.e Unreal Engine 4, LLVM or Firefox) in Eclipse (CDT) and try to refactor something trivial like a single function name in the same way you would Java. It wont work. To be honest, I doubt you could even get the project loading and building in Eclipse (Eclipse is simply not flexible enough for large projects). For one, Eclipse has no concept of custom build tools like ubt.
As long as you keep enough control to do exactly what you want.
