The parent was talking about "nostalgia" and "replacing C" so I assumed they were talking about more recent languages like Rust, C++, D, Go, Zig and all these newer system languages.
I agree that if we're talking about why C took over in the first place it's a different discussion.
There is an history of 10 years of systems programming languages, preceding it. Prooving one does not need to throw security out of the window in systems languages.
Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell UNIX, instead of giving it away for a symbolic price and C would have been a footnote on history of system languages.