I'm not a he (some other folks used "they" which is fine), but this is otherwise a pretty good interpretation - it absolutely was a dig at C, not elitism.
If you're going to learn a bunch of modern tooling and start a green field project that justifies that complexity, C is generally a poor choice. Learn a modern language.
I use C somewhat regularly, including for kernel stuff, embedded, and legacy code.
Mostly, though, when I use C, it's because I'm doing a small thing that I need to be very fast, and I haven't yet bothered to get comfortable with Rust.
oops, i'm sorry i misgendered you. i think i have fixed it now, but now the editing window has closed
on your other points i mostly agree, except that if i write a library in any popular 'modern' language, it can only be called from that language, which seems like a missed opportunity
and when i went back and compared development time logs, the development speed advantages of modern languages seem to be only a factor of 2 or 3 over c, once i get beyond a few hundred lines
which i guess is why linux, firefox, cpython, gcc, apache, poppler, libvte, and so on are written in c or occasionally c++. it's not because the authors didn't know about common lisp, scheme, ml, smalltalk, and so on, or couldn't figure out how to write a garbage collector
rust and some other unpopular modern languages look like they might change that situation (nim, zig, koka, a couple of others i can't think of right now)
If you're going to learn a bunch of modern tooling and start a green field project that justifies that complexity, C is generally a poor choice. Learn a modern language.
I use C somewhat regularly, including for kernel stuff, embedded, and legacy code.
Mostly, though, when I use C, it's because I'm doing a small thing that I need to be very fast, and I haven't yet bothered to get comfortable with Rust.