I've typically found that the tradeoffs between security, performance, and implementation efforts are usually more to blame for why writing secure C code is a challenge. There are a ton of tools out there to help with writing secure code (compiler diagnostics, secure coding standards, static analyzers, fuzzers, sanitizers, etc), but you need to use all the tools at your disposal (instead of only a single source of security) which adds implementation cost and sometimes runtime overhead that needs to be balanced against shipping a product.

This isn't to suggest that the language itself doesn't have sharp edges that would be nice to smooth over, though!