As soon as you have dependencies you are dealing with however the authors decided to build things.
Part of why languages exist is just to get a new ecosystem.
At this point, you could fork C/C++, only remove features, give it a new name, a new package service, and maybe fork the standard library, and you could end up with something pretty competitive against Zig or Rust.
Yes, new languages try to create a new ecosystem. I think this is a bad thing - we already have too many of such - often somewhat isolated - language ecosystems. But I also do not think we need new ecosystems, when we can evolve the existing one. I have seen C evolve quite a bit over time, so the idea that we have to create new ecosystems to solve problems is wrong in my opinion. C evolves very slowly, which means that some things need more time, but I also think that it is generally a very good thing that it evolves slowly.
This is why new ecosystems starts. Not everyone is ok with the slow pace
But I think a fair comparison of new languages to C has to take modern C features and tooling into account.