I have nothing against Algol. Turbo Pascal was my first language (i agree with you about Turbo C). I loved it at the time. But C is different. The same way Lisp is different. It is just one of those languages which have a very simple core idea which is also very powerful at the same time.

Lisp has the code-data duality (everything is a list) going for it and C has everything is pointer to a block of memory and that's it. That block can be a device register, data structure, array of sth. or just about anything you can imagine. This idea enables you some kind of proto-polymorphism without the verbosity and chains of higher level languages (at the cost of safety of course). That is the beauty of C and unlike Lisp it is also lot closer to the metal, which helped a lot with performance.

I think it's normal to be jaded when something objectively superior is being replaced with something simpler. But that doesn't mean the simpler thing is without merit. The world has more dimensions, the technical aspect is just one of it.