Not tyranny of masses. C compilers became more popular because they could actually run in reasonable amount of time.
On my piece of the world we were mostly using BASIC, Pascal dialects, Clipper, until Windows 3.x took over and make C relevant, alongside Petzold's book.
And by then, many of us would rather use Borland compilers with Object Windows Library in C++ and Turbo Pascal, than deal with Win16 directly.
Naturally on UNIX land it was another matter.
Languages that cared about compilation speed from the start.
And it shows.