It's more that it's the most honest representation of the assembly/machine code. We can't really get closer to the hardware than the interface the CPU offers, and C then sticks pretty close to that (or a subset of it, I suppose).

It's the simplicity and power of C that I find attractive. I don't write it professionally at the moment, but I enjoy it. It's obviously not the right tool for the job most of the time for the reasons you give, but I miss its elegance.

I am a big fan of rust, but it's massive compared to C. I'd like to explore Zig some day.