If you want or have to build a large program, something must be large, be it the language, its standard library, third party code, or code you write.

I think it’s best if it is one of the first two, as that makes it easier to add third party code to your code, and will require less effort to bring newcomers up to speed w.r.t. the code. As an example, take strings. C doesn’t really have them as a basic type, so third party libraries all invent their own, requiring those using them to add glue code.

That’s why standard libraries and, to a lesser extent, languages, tend to grow.

Ideally that’s with backwards compatibility, but there’s a tension between moving fast and not making mistakes, so sometimes, errors are made, and APIs ‘have’ to be deprecated or removed.

It's a balance thing. You can't make a language without any features, but you can be too small ('Brainfuck') and you can definitely be too large ('C++'). There is a happy medium in there somewhere and the lack of a string type was perceived as a major shortcoming of C, but then again, if you realize that they didn't even have structs in the predecessor to C (even though plenty of languages at the time did have similar constructs) they got enough of it right that it ended up taking off.

C and personal computing hit their stride at roughly the same time, your choices were (if you didn't feel like spending a fortune) Assembly, C, Pascal and BASIC for most systems that mere mortals could afford. BASIC was terribly slow, Pascal and C a good match and assembler only for those with absolutely iron discipline. Which one of the two won out (C or Pascal) was a toss up, Pascal had it's own quirks and it was mostly a matter of which of the two won out in terms of critical mass. Some people still swear by Pascal (and usually that makes them Delphi programmers, which will be around until the end because the code for the heat-death of the universe was writting in it).

For me it was Mark Williams C that clinched it, excellent documentation, good UNIX (and later Posix) compatibility and whatever I wrote on the ST could usually be easily ported to the PC. And once that critical mass took over there was really no looking back, it was C or bust. But mistakes were made, and we're paying the price for that in many ways. Ironically, C enabled the internet to come into existence and the internet then exposed mercilessly all of the inherent flaws in C.