My experience is that languages survives not because of a particular feature, but because they are USEFUL in practice to produce a software.
The fact that C is used in so many places speaks for itself about it usefulness. And this is done by writing software by majority of C programmers instead of jumping on every forum to attack other languages, writing extended blog posts just to convince people that they "should" switch to the language they like.
Also if you believe bounds check is the most difficult thing in software development, it just mean that you haven't dealt with a sufficient system yet or you just pretends to be.
The similar thing also applied to that if you think naively putting pthread_mutex_lock and unlock around the data structure is hard, it just means you haven't touched the scenarios that C programmers resorts to non-trivial locking mechanisms for.