Market dominance can be read as ecosystem dominance, and that reading obviously exists. More specifically, the C language could be completely worthless on its own, but made good enough to be usable through tooling (eg fuzzing, valgrind, etc). As it turns out, theres a lot more involved in writing an OS than just the language; and its all so conjoined at the hip, enough so that it makes it quite difficult to change just the language. But this is an argument that despite C’s flaws, its existence is on the whole preferrable to a total rewrite.

>If there is a safer, cheaper, faster language to use, someone would be using it

someone is using other languages. Urbit, redox, lisp machines, mirage are all not-c systems/OSs. But you aren’t talking about writing an OS, you’re talking about writing a popular OS. Of which there are basically three worth noting, all of which happen to have sprung up around a similar timeframe, coincidentally when C was at its most popular...

You seem to have confused the software industry for some kind of meritocracy... it is not. It follows trends harder than than the fashion industry. Look ...anywhere... for examples: OS, DB, language, game design and tooling, the AI winters, the .com crash, everything about the web, HN itself, etc. Hell, your own argument is just bandwagoning, with nothing about the technical merit (smarter people than I are using it, thus I should... is exactly how we end up in this state)