I sometimes write C recreationally. The real problem I have with it is that it's overly laborious for the boring parts (e.g. spelling out inductive datatypes). If you imagine that a large amount of writing a compiler (or similar) in C amounts to juggling tagged unions (allocating, pattern matching over, etc.), it's very tiring to write the same boilerplate again and again. I've considered writing a generator to alleviate much of the tedium, but haven't bothered to do it yet. I've also considered developing C projects by appealing to an embeddable language for prototyping (like Python, Lua, Scheme, etc.), and then committing the implementation to C after I'm content with it (otherwise, the burden of implementation is simply too high).

It's difficult because I do believe there's an aesthetic appeal in doing certain one-off projects in C: compiled size, speed of compilation, the sense of accomplishment, etc. but a lot of it is just tedious grunt work.