There will never be a true successor to C since C is "high level assembly." The lack of pointer checking, unsafe casts and non-existent bounds checking aren't an oversight but by design! Assembly doesn't have them so neither does C! There's no reason to whine about it.

The real problem is that people are using C for the wrong reasons. C is for the development of operating systems and low-level code, not applications.

Zig is more modern but anything that does even one iota more of hand-holding or has anything that looks like a guardrail fails the test.

If you want to write applications use Pascal, Java, C#, Swift or Go.