The short answer is that C makes it easy to do things that you probably shouldn't ought to be doing. (The the answer to the opposite, "what work is C appropriate for?" is systems and embedded stuff, where doing-things-you-probably-shouldn't is largely the name of the game.)

Another answer is that C doesn't have much in the way of guardrails; in a world where programmer time is much more expensive than machine time, guardrails make programming much faster.