Spend one year to study multiple languages - bash, C, C++, Go, Python ... and even Mojo or Rust. 10-20 hours a week. Being able to read top programming languages is the best investment I ever made. You will become fearless and can see the matrix ;)
I don't regret it. But if ML is your main goal, Python is where you will end up because it's where the libraries are.
interesting! did you consider Go?
You'd have to be deep into ML Infrastructure to use C, probably via CUDA. No-one who develops or uses ML models touches C or even C++. tinygrad and llama.cpp are exceptions.