I’ve never worked at a startup. I know very few people who have been involved in the startup world. I have exclusively used C and C++ in my professional work (with a tiny bit of python for scripting).

Yet I haven’t know anybody who primarily or even occasionally used C in their work for over a decade. I know they exist but the majority of C programmers moved on to C++ a long time ago.

There are areas like kernel and driver development where C is still in widespread use but these jobs represent a tiny fraction of developers.

Any language popularity metric that ranks C as the second most popular language is massively flawed.