I'm really starting to believe that there's a cohort of modern programmers that only see programming languages in terms of the high level syntactical features they provide.

The logic of it is something like: I write the code, I run a command written using similar code, scenes deleted, my program runs and my IDE tells me if there are problems in my code.

This is sometimes defined as the difference between developers and engineers, but I don't really buy the analogy because they're mostly highly competent and able to build solid and principled architecture into their software.

This is the only reason I can summise that educated programmers would say something like C is irrelevant.

I guess not everyone needs to have a depth of understanding of the platforms that underly their languages of choice, but - as demonstrated here - it certainly doesn't inform the future of languages when they are inherently tied to their ability to integrate with different hardware and OSs.

It was already irrelevant when using MS-DOS with Turbo Pascal/Modula-2/Basic compilers, or Mac OS (originally written in Object Pascal/Assembly).

It was UNIX industry adoption, followed by GNU Manifesto that made to more relevant than it should ever have been.

So, it's not relevant, but then it's more relevant?

Well, sure, merit and popularity rarely align, and one with enough technical culture can always imagine a better world.

The truth is, C is merely a historical artifact, one step above the PDP-11 assembly, created in order to make the UNIX source code portable. It has transcended its original purpose, and with it being elegant and simple as it is, I would still never trust it to run a pacemaker.