I disagree. Maybe in syntax it's a bit different but in spirit I think it's absolutely a modern C. Purely procedural code and manually memory managed. On top of that Ginger Bills stated goal for the project is to basically grind down all the rough edges off C.

Plus if you look at something like Zig, it syntactically starts to drift a lot as well. They left behind C's "use matches declaration" approach (thank God), capture groups look like nothing in C, function definitions are entirely different, the list goes on.