I think C doesn't have to be the first language you learn but I do think it should come fairly early, because otherwise you don't have an appreciation for a lot of the things the computer is actually doing when you're writing your code. Try explaining the concept of "stack vs heap" to someone who's only done python programming, for example.

My brother went through a coding bootcamp that focused on Python and JS and then he started to get into Golang on his own and one day he asked me what the point of pointers is. We ended down a rabbithole that kind of blew his mind. Stack vs heap, the structure of the call stack, manual memory management, etc.