It's worth popping the hood and getting your fingers dirty. C was written in an era where memory was a scarce and precious resource to be grudgingly used if absolutely necessary
Not to say that it's not worth it to learn manual memory management as well, but it is important not to think that GCs are a fancy modern tool, and that greybeards would never touch one. There were greybeards using punch cards and programming in a GC language, with output printed out on paper.