It was already clear in the late 70's and early 90's that C wasn't a reliable option to write safe systems.

Dennis M. Ritchie himself on the history of the language[0]

"To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions."

Lint which is still mostly ignored by the masses to this day. At CppCon 2015, about 1% of the audience acknowledge using static analyzers.

Per Brinch Hansen letter to C.A.R. Hoare in 1993a [1]

"The 1980s will probably be remembered as the decade in which programmers took a gigantic step backwards by switching from secure Pascal-like languages to insecure C-like languages. I have no rational explanation for this trend. But it seems to me that if computer programmers cannot even agree that security is an essential requirement of any programming language, then we have not yet established a discipline of computing based on commonly accepted principles."

There are many other sources of similar statements since C exists, so the hate isn't something new.

Regarding C++, yes unfortunately it inherits C flaws, but at least the community tends to embrace language features to improve the language safety and push for type based programming.

[0] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

[1] brinch-hansen.net/papers/1999b.pdf