As someone who started their computer science studies with Pascal and then switched to C (I use C for comparison because it was the dominant programming language in 1990s computer science programs) , I can say that C just offered more to the aspiring software developer. For most people who coded in the 90s Pascal meant Turbo Pascal. While the language itself was great, MS-DOS where it ran not so much.

Especially when you compared MS-DOS to Unix (I say Unix because this was before Linux was dominant) systems which most computer science students were being introduced to at the time. With C you got access to all the Unix dev tools and you could do Unix systems programming. I think too a lot of young computer science students go through a phase of all things difficult are good and C on Unix made for a great learning opportunity.

Speaking as myself, the problem was the ecosystem not the language per say. I think for most of us it isn't even a contest between MS-DOS or Unix.