One of the odd things about C, historically speaking, is actually how impoverished it was compared to macro assemblers written at around the same time. Those didn't have much of a type system either, but you could get all kinds of power with them. No modern assembler is really comparable, much to my dismay.
Modern developers have gotten so used to the fact that C is "low level" that they tend to forget how low really low level coding is. There's a ton of "high level" language features in every 3GL, and that includes C. The abstractive distance from machine code to a language like C or Pascal is far, far higher than it is between C and Python.