> The more esoteric a language is, I find the more _passion_ the average developer has for that language, it's libraries, and tooling.

If they weren't passionate, why use an esoteric language? If you want an easy time, something mainstream will be easier. It isn't like anything is actually impossible to implement in C; there are just trade offs in number of bugs and time to implement. Both of which are minor impediments vs algorithm and program architecture. Anything newer than C is just bonus modern features.