If you compare with Xerox PARC hardware not really, the major issue was the price to produce the type of architecture they were having.
As for safe systems programming, Burroughs was already doing it a decade early in computer hardware much weaker than a PDP-11.
Every 10 years or so the industry just restarts the same loop it's been stuck in since the Amiga (actually the Amiga is probably the first loop starting with the Alto) just with different syntax and faster hardware. Software is stagnant; ALL progress in in hardware. And with the end of Moore's Law that is grinding to a halt too.
And in a way that's a real pity. It could have been that if Moore's law had been a doubling in 30 years rather than 18 months that we'd have had a lot more appreciation for writing good software. As it was the crap won out over the good stuff simply by being bailed out by Moore's law just in time for the next cycle.
But in some alternate universe hardware progress was so slow that any gains had to come from better software.
And stack turtles.
Whenever i see a headline about unikernels, i envision doom running on DOS in a VM on top of Linux on top of some hardware somewhere. How many layers of (potentially leaky) abstractions are we looking at?
The minimal set of reliable human computer interface is a keyboard and a screen. going beyond that quickly add either noise, delays, or both.
That's pretty simple to explain: all those other options were just way too slow to get the kind of performance required out of the hardware available at the time. The difference was simply too large to be ignored.
It's all nice and good to theorize about how the past should have been, but without UNIX you probably wouldn't be writing any of this on the medium you're currently using.
It has its flaws and it is far from perfect but at the time it fit the bill nicely.
The real problem is that we are categorically unable to move on when better options are around. There is a large amount of silliness involved when it comes to making responsible choices in computing, lots of ego, lots of NIH. Those are the real problems, not that UNIX was written in C.