It is very easy to say, retrospectively, in year 2022, that the decisions were horrible. You are talking about the language and decisions made in 1970s. The knowledge was different. The computers were different, their capability was different. Try running your Python on PDP-7, an 18-bit system! ASCII vs EBCDIC is a computer architecture issue and it's unfair to blame the language that it doesn't have automatic/transparent support for EBCDIC (stuff from 1960s, by the way!). Unicode simply didn't exist at that time. And so on and so forth.

On the contrary, I would say C aged really well for a language which was created to support an entire zoo of computers and operating systems. It is worth pointing out that the language has progressed a lot since then and you don't have to deal with many old headaches if you write C on a modern CPU architecture.