K&R may be archaic now, even obsolete. However, for decades it has was held up as a an example of what a good technical/language book could be. You don't have to agree with the assessment to agree with the fact - that this was touted as a very good technical book for various reasons.
There never was a "K&R" of C++. That's not unusual, many languages are in the same boat. If you want to go back to the "firsts" it would be a combination of The C++ Primer and Strousoup, putting them together gave you something that was both more and less that K&R was for C.
From the software engineering point of view, almost every single code example is terrible. Abundant implicit casts depending on the OS, loops that leak buffered reading between iterations, etc etc.
Just no. Never, ever recommend K&R to anybody as a general programming book neither for C or in general. Only the intro descriptions of language characteristics and important functions of the standard library are any use, and then again even these are extremely obsolete now.
There is, however (like or not), a reason we even now say "X is the K&R of Y". As such it is a bit silly to claim that the only reason K&R succeeded as well as it did was by being early....
Strongly disagree.
There's not a whole lot that's changed in C11, (C is kind of "done" at this point) and there's not been a newer book that teaches the language so well.
You nailed it with that analogy though.
K&R is a "first book" and important historically, but right now it's an atrocious book if you want to learn current C and this has been the case for a long, long time.
Sometimes these first books don't withstand the test of time.