You definitely can't manage a C program with dependencies the way you would a Rust program with Cargo. You'd ordinarily bring in a couple major deps --- OpenSSL, zlib, pcre, &c --- and then maybe vendor in the small stuff. Most large C projects don't dep in things like logging or error handling the way Rust programs all do.
This particular program needs no third party dependencies at all; in fact, I bet it'd get longer if I added them (like a glib hash table, or pcre).
I'm fed up with C dependencies, which like Makefiles, always seem to be very easy in principle, and then kill by thousand cuts (like a regex library that defines a symbol that happens to conflict with a POSIX regex function, which I didn't even use, but it corrupted memory of a completely different dependency elsewhere).