Good choices depend heavily on circumstances, so, what are you trying to do, for how long, and with whom? Even if what you're trying to do isn't programming per se, but something like betting on how you'll make programming related money in the future, it matters to specify what exactly it is you're trying to do before you evaluate the choices.
I think at least it's hard to argue CL would be a bad choice in general, and it's certainly proved itself over the decades in many domains and circumstances... But there are always tradeoffs, and other languages can be better choices when circumstances push different ones.
A particular blog post that gets passed around (you may very well have seen it) is https://www.darkchestnut.com/2017/pragmatic-reasons-for-choo... It's just an example of the process, but it's still valid. His list of requirements might not be your list, or your weighting might be different. (It's been fun reading tweets from https://twitter.com/rainerjoswig this month just to appreciate how portable CL code is across CPU architectures and implementations and if you value that a lot why wouldn't you consider CL very highly; meanwhile others don't value portability and are fine with an effectively iOS-only language or whatever.)
I don't really follow your statement about implementations being fragmented --> stagnant standard. The standard is the standard, it's as immutable as C89. Or do you mean you're sad that there's unlikely to be a new revision to the standard that all the implementations will adopt, unlike C99 and beyond (which still isn't fully supported by all the big players)? That's understandable, but you probably used the portable libraries that offer the big things one might want from a new standard, so...