Yes, people absolutely use code generators with C. But they do this because of deficiencies in the language, and everyone basically agrees that C is the lowest common denominator in terms of languages -- it's portable assembly essentially.

Go missing generics except for built-in containers; and then not having anything but the bare minimum for those built-ins is a critical defect of the language. The fact that you can work around that defect doesn't make it any less of a defect.