I'm not debating that there are a lot of projects written in C++. I only argue that C is enough to be able to learn about state-of-the-art tech in this area.

I'm not even going to debate C++'s merits at this point. Everybody's had enough of that already. There are people who stick to it and there are those who bailed after a while. It's just that, if I have a choice, I won't work with the people who belong to the former group.