> Another failure with this approach is C/C++. For reasons that I kind of understand but don't approve, its standard library either hidden (so I can't just navigate to malloc implementation) or obfuscated with endless underscores (header template libraries), which makes it unreadable.

That's a complaint with C++, not with C.

You can very easily do development in C without much of what you rely on when using Java, C#, C++, etc.

The one thing, in C, that I do lean on a lot is compilation errors I get shown while developing: C is simple enough that a build of the current project's changed files takes 20ms or so. In practice, it builds faster than I can type.