It has essentially the predictability and simplicity of C, just with a minimal amount of dynamic binding to make it comfortable. And NSString variants tend to take care of string handling and encodings.
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.