I'd argue that GPUs and SIMD instructions have so many restrictions that they're useless for general purpose computing. Yeah, they have niche spaces, but in terms of all the different kinds of programs we write, I think those spaces are going to remain niche.
Doing fused SIMD-vectorised operations will likely bring the advantages of both, with relatively small downsides. This is a relatively common technique for libraries like Eigen (in C++), that batch a series of operations via "Expression Templates" and then execute them all in as a single sequence, using SIMD when appropriate. (Other examples are C++ ranges and Rust iterators, although these are focused on ensuring loop fusion and any vectorisation is compiler autovectorisation... but they are written with that in mind: effort is put into helping the building blocks vectorise.)
GPUs and other specialized hardware aren't good at everything, and I acknowledged as much upthread, but the set of problems they're good at is large and growing.
C is fundamentally a scalar language. In 2018, the only code for which "classic" C is the fastest is code that exhibits a low level of data parallelism and depends on dynamic superscalar scheduling. Fundamentally sequential algorithms like LZ data compression, or very branchy code like HTTP servers, are examples. This kind of code is becoming increasingly less prevalent as hardware fills in the gaps. Whereas we used to have C matrix multiplies, now we have TPUs and Neural Engines. We used to have H.264 video codecs, but now we have huge video decoding blocks on every x86 CPU Intel ships. Software implementations of AES used to be the go-to solution, but now we have AES-NI. Etc.
As an example, I'm playing around with high-performance fluid dynamics simulations in my spare time. Twenty years ago, C++ would have been the only game in town. But I went with TypeScript. Why? Because the performance-sensitive parts are GLSL anyway--if you're writing scalar code in any language, you've lost--and the edit/run/debug cycle of the browser is hard to beat.