"An API should be easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly"
The dumbest link in the chain is always the guy writing the code, not the programming language, and not the machine executing it. So things should be designed in a way that makes it as hard as possible for programmers to make errors.
e: video is here for those who are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tg1ONG18H8
Think about how often you blindly inserted a USB A or B (mini-B, micro-B) plug the wrong way first and had to try again. Why is the wrong way even possible? USB C's plug fixes this.
A huge improvement to railway safety was the invention of Mechanical Interlocking. It was made essentially impossible to set signals in some inherently unsafe ways. When you tried to give a Clear signal to the Express, through a junction a late running Coal Train is already crossing, the huge metal lever you're trying to move to do that won't budge because all your controls are connected via elaborate mechanical interlocking to prevent this mistake. The signal remains at Danger, the Express stops, tragedy is averted.
To be honest this isn't really an issue once you notice that the logo side of the USB connector indicates up. I suspect this is mostly an issue because USB connectors have only a tiny self-alignment range (<1 mm), which leads to the "USB exists in a 4D state" meme.
So, based on those two comments, you have zero data (anecdotal or other) comparing the rate of bugs in C programs versus other languages since you didn't test any C programs.
Code security is not about eliminating bugs but about lowering the rate they show up at since things always get through and money/time is finite. Pen testing doesn't catch everything and many projects that have been tested still yield bugs. There's also a limit to how much money can be spent on testing so using it find (and document, review, etc.) low hanging bugs due to using C means you're more likely to miss a deeper bug.
Or in other words, spending the same effort to pen test a safe language will leave fewer bugs left over than spending it to pen test an unsafe language. So using an unsafe language is still worse.