C is great for its basics, but at some level, when you gain awareness of all of your unpunished pointer lifetime sins and how annoying the lack of basic data structures is in stdlib, then you realize that biting the bullet and learning something like Rust is the way to go. Maybe a better stdlib would help, but I've found that the pain of becoming proficient in Rust has paid back multiples over the continual toil of doing certain repetitive tasks in C.