I really dislike the Swift/Scala/Rust/Dart/Kotlin etc. style, heavy and centralised syntax. ObjC is not very beautiful, but it has an elegant way of combining composable primitives (functions and objects). The same kinda sorta goes for Perl too, which I think is a nicer alternative to C in this stack.

Er...not really. First of all, the context was "C is pretty nice for this". Objective-C adds just a tiny bit on top of C, including safe/correct string handling, and is otherwise very similar in its characteristics.

Swift is an entirely new language, more like Rust or Kotlin. It's also not based on the clang compiler, clang is a C/Objective-C/C++ front end for LLVM.

As to "nicer/modern", well...it does clean up some of the effects of having a hybrid (syntax duplication). Other than that, it is in many ways a step back towards C++ style languages, static/brittle, incredibly complex and incredibly slow to compile.

Small nit: swift is built in llvm, much like clang is, but it's not based on it.

I also remember when Apple was pushing Java as an option for writing Cocoa apps. What little I did back then never felt like a first class citizen compared to ObjC.