I’m all for using C for native development (and because I find it fun to work in occasionally), but I agree with your sentiment here. Not only do you have to manage memory manually, but you also have to do a lot more work for basic string manipulation which is the vast majority of web work. I would much rather work with a language with built in support for string manipulation and well known 3rd party libraries with good ergonomics for working with JSON, which a lot of your APIs will most likely be using.