I've taught several different languages to both 1st year uni students, and new joiners to a technical company, where they had no programming background.

Honestly, C seems to be one of the easier languages to teach the basics of. It's certainly easier than Java or C++, which have many more concepts.

C has some concepts that confuse the hell out of beginners, and it will let you shoot yourself in the foot very thoroughly with them (much more than say, Java). But you don't tend to encounter them till later on.

I have never said getting good at C is easy. Just that it's easy to pick up.

C made a lot more sense to me after having done assembly (6502 in my case, but it probably doesn't matter). Things like passing a reference suddenly just made sense.

I agree. For me as a beginner, C was relatively easy to learn the basics of. Sure, I never went on to get familiar with all the details and become proficient in it, but the basic concepts really aren’t that hard to understand. There’s just not too much you need to wrap your head around.