In my opinion, Rust, though large, is in some sense quite minimal. Lot's of features in Rust are actually needed to allow the compiler to statically reason about memory safety.

And this is why Rust is likely going to take over from C, not because it is the most C-like design, but because it can provide static safety guarantees.

There is considerable pressure, at least for internet facing code, to show that it is safe. And that is way to hard to do (and keep doing) for C.

Of course, somebody may come up with a brilliant design. But lots of organizations don't want to wait for that. They don't want to keep writing new code in C. And Rust has by now a mature compiler, a very active community.