Even as a polyglot that picks up new languages quickly and often, I think this is true of most actively maintained major languages now.

We’re in an age where major languages are expected to cross-pollinate: if there’s a cool paradigm or technique in some other major language, how do we evolve our language to support it?

That’s not a terrible thing in itself, but it means that most major languages are multi-paradigm now and become more so every release.

As a consequence, learning becomes less straightforward.

C may feel like a nice starter to you specifically because it’s been comparatively resistant to this trend. It’s got a ton of tricks to learn, but there are only a few paths through learning it.