Hmm? I'm not saying all C programmers are good, or even that people should prefer C for production code. I'm claiming that if you're bad at C programming, you're not going to be not-bad at programming some other "higher" imperative language.
No C programmer has ever been good. It demands an inhuman level of perfection, or formal methods that boil down to a theorem proving language with C window dressing (the mostly-proprietary stuff Rust competes with).