There is huge potential for a modern light weight C replacement. Golang went in this direction, but it has a runtime with a GC. Rust is low level, but is quite a complex language. So, there is a gap in the market.

One cool aspect of all of these new programming languages entering the arena is that most of them only have a minimal (or no) runtime. That should make it much easier to interoperate between all of these languages, something which has traditionally been difficult with most programming languages.

Disclosure: I'm the author of Muon [1], a low-level language that embodies similar design principles.

[1] https://github.com/nickmqb/muon

Maybe because it's the layer of the stack most ancient, unsafe, and in need of replacing.

Its not! The vast majority of languages are garbage collected high level languages. How many non-GC'd C replacement languages have been created? Seems like there are only a handful. Hardly bikeshedding.

I think it's a mistake to think that in 10,000 years C will remain the golden standard for a language that still is reasonably close to the hardware.

It's no longer close to the hardware

Not necessarily contrary to my point.

To hide any les of the machine you start giving up portability. c- might be a counterexample.