You have to allocate and deallocate--where and when does that occur? When the data structure needs to grow, all pointers need to be invalidated--where and when does that occur? How do you iterate across the data structure? Do those iterators hold a local pointer or do they hold a root pointer plus an accessor function pointer plus memoization? What happens when you want to copy a subset of the data structure? I can go on and on.

Every one of those things requires a fairly primitive function call that sometimes doesn't even need to exist in another language. For contrast, think about all the macrology that the Linux kernel does to iterate across every element of a linked list that is effectively "for element in list {}" in any higher language.

And, even worse, most of that stuff in C needs to be runtime-only, while some of this kind of thing gets elided by the compiler in other languages.

If you don't consider all that "stupidly verbose" I'm really curious what you would?

And this is long before we start talking about concurrency.

C allows you to write something that works "just enough" that you put it into production and then it bites you in the ass (similar to quadratic algorithms--functional enough to get to production and then bite you).