Well, duh: if you remove the most egregious footguns from C, you end up basically with Pascal, and here is Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language.
And when you try to explain to them that C's abstract machine has semantics of "when you omit a safety check, you actually makes a promise to the compiler that this check is redundant, that you'll promise that you'll make sure in some other way that in no possible execution will the illegal values ever show up in this place, and the compiler will actually hold you to this promise" — they throw tantrums and try to argue that no, it hasn't this semantics, and even if has, it's not the semantics as originally intended by K&R and it is the authors of the C compilers who are wrong (even though the authors of C compilers are the people who actually write both the C standards and the C compilers...)
Must have to do something with imprintment: I've learned C as my 3rd language, and from the start I was taught that its UB is absolutely insane — and I've never felt "nah, it should just do what I meant, dangit" denial about it, only "this is sad, how can I even know while writing code when I am making a baseless promise especially when it's made by omitting something?" But like you've said, people like their footguns.