What if the need is for a small language without generics?

If there was such a need, the languages without them would still have a major market, which isn't the case.

Naturally those of us coding since the early days have experience with programming languages without generics support, yet a large majority eventually adopted generics.

Even C has minimal generics support since C11.

In what context would “need” a language to not have generics? I can understand not “wanting” generics to keep it simpler, but I can’t see that as a “need”.

Personally, in any typed language, I want generics, not having them feels very limiting.