It took another couple of years until I understood what I lacked wasn't time spent reading another section on pointers but additional tooling. Using a debugger and stepping through programs was the next breakthrough.
Looking back today understanding my C (on UNIX) isn't just the language it's a whole ecosystem of tools to measure what is going on and manipulating state so that I can troubleshoot. After gdb came valgrind, strace, lsof, signal handling (kill), process control, gcov, the appropriate type of CFLAGS to use (e.g. the compiler itself) and how to stay sane using Make.
None of them have to do with pointers but they make life a lot easier. To become productive at this takes years but becoming good took me decades. C (imho) isn't just another language but a complete career path with dozens of branches into other areas.
If you stay patient with yourself and treat it as a journey instead of a milestone it can deepen your understanding of systems (nod to eBPF) in situations many others will bail out long before.
Don't give up and then not much will look scary any more.