I am an old c-head (actually pascal was my first compiled language) and I remember in the early aughts writing vtables manually in C because I didn't trust what I couldn't see in c++ (I'm also pushing 40)

I have to say, zig really captures this feel. The only places where it gets a tiny bit strange in the way you complain about is comptime, but imo it is a very good trade-off for ditching the preprocessor and ditching make. And anyways comptime is far more easy to reason about than some of the mangled ways in which people who use C (in prod) use preprocessor: It took me weeks to understand the ffi header file for the erlang VM, for example. Three languages for the price of 1.25. not bad.