I guess we can look forward to 2045 when C based projects argue over if it's ok to start using these features.

What's needed is a "C historian" who documents all the attempts to rework or compete with C, and make an analysis and summary of the results and trade-offs. I doubt there's a free lunch (no trade-offs), but studying past attempts can tell what's been close.

Some folks just have the ball and are running with it. The complexity of the language is growing even if you use C99. Just look at https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language it's quite a bit bigger with the new additions. The C additions are going beyond their original scope of 'only things major compilers have already implemented' as well.