Small binary and a toolchain that's small and older than most programmers using it, and known to be bug-free. Top tool if you want to write something that a real human being can "get under the hood of" and understand throughout.

As for low-level, sure that's no longer the case. It was a low-level language for K&R and their PDP-11 where they could tell precisely what will be assembler code for each line of their C code and how many CPU cycles it will take. That's no longer the case indeed.