> The C language is old and boring. It is a well-known and well-understood language.
...I think they are very fundamentally mistaken. C is a horribly complicated language. It is one of the least-understood languages out there. Experienced programmers and compiler authors can debate for hours about whether C code of less than 50 lines has defined behavior or not, and still not come to a conclusion. People can write an entire PhD thesis <https://robbertkrebbers.nl/thesis.html> studying the semantics of C, and still leave many open question (chapter 2 of that thesis does not require any academic background to be understandable, and it comes with tons of links to tickets/questions filed against the C standard). Consistently writing safe C/C++ is near impossible <http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/07/confession-of-cc-program..., and judging from <https://sqlite.org/testing.html> the SQLite team agrees.
C is old, yes -- and C has boring and well-understood fragments. But full C is very, very poorly understood.