This is a popular sentiment. However, there's Checked-C and Cyclone, and they have very little traction.

To make static analysis robust in C you need to start reliably tracking ownership and forbid type-erasing constructs. This typically means adding smart pointers, some kind of borrow checking or garbage collection, generics to replace void*, maybe tagged unions, and a new standard library that embraces these features.

It's going to bring most of Rust's complexity and require major code changes anyway, but you won't even get benefits of a newer language.