Yeah, there's so much misery in the C ecosystem that it's better to eschew it altogether. Even merely packaging anything that depends on C ends up being a hugely painful undertaking since every C library has its own bespoke build system and its own implicit set of dependencies (and implicit versions of those dependencies, and expectations about where on the system those dependencies live).
I mostly like C as a language, but between the security concerns and the tooling concerns (and the community's zealous devotion to ignoring these very real problems) I'm really excited for its increasing marginalization. Unfortunately, it's not being marginalized in favor of "a better C", but rather every ecosystem is rewriting the same stuff from scratch which seems like a bit of a bummer (but still better than depending on C).