Thanks. My first few jobs out of college were programming in pure C, doing embedded software. I do have good memories of that time, although I'm not sure I would have the patience for ten-minute compile times these days. (Obviously not all C projects have that, but the ones I worked on did.)

If you haven't already, you should check out the C projects from Justine Tunny. Specifically redbean, cosmopolitan libc and ape. https://justine.lol/

Whether you should use them professionally is questionably. But for me they made writing C fun again.