We see so much languages being invented, and many of them do active anti-C marketing. But personally, I do not find it difficult to work in and also enjoy it much more than working in many other languages. There are, of course, build systems one can use, they are just not tied to the language - which build systems should not be. I also do not find most UB a problem in practice, many of them can be fixed simply by using the right compiler flags. Some are more difficult to fix, but think the problem is massively exaggerated. One can also use C with a garbage collector, as GCC does (technically it is now C++).

I agree about your dogfooding comment though.

I like working in C too, but if better C developers than me say they can’t use it safely then I’m not going to think that I somehow can.

And even though I like writing C, the build tooling and the lack of modules system and a bunch of other footguns remain. (And say what you will about language-specific build tools, but they work very well for 99% of cases, and the benefits of the entire ecosystem using the same tool are significant).

Moreover, I want contributors to my language, and the reality is that however much I like C, the intersection of people who want to work on my language and people who like writing C is going to be vanishingly small. If my language is C-like (e.g., Zig) then that intersection will likely be much bigger, but as the target language approaches C, the benefit of using C goes to 0.