> The only people really choosing C in 2025 are those with a ton of experience under their belt, who are comfortable with the language and its footguns due to decades of experience.

Experienced users of C can't be the only people who use it if the language is going to thrive. It's very bad for a language when the only ones who speak it are those who speak it well. The only way you get good C programmers is by cultivating bad C programmers, you can't have one without the other. If you cut off the bad programmers (by shunning or just not appealing to them, or loading your language with too many beginner footguns), there's no pipeline to creating experts, and the language dies when the experts do.

The people who come along to work on their legacy systems are better described as archaeologists than programmers. COBOL of course is the typical example, there's no real COBOL programming community to speak of, just COBOL archeologists who maintain those systems until they too shall die and it becomes someone else's problem, like the old Knight at the end of Indiana Jones.