EDIT Not many hackers on hackernews apparently.
Holding your own code to a high standard is great, but wouldn’t it be nicer if you could offload more of that into the tooling and spend more time on the problem or making the code even cleaner?
Also as a side note: I always find it funny that a flag that represents all warnings doesn’t actually turn on all warnings.
C also has the advantage that there are many, many different compilers targeting many, many, /many/ different architectures. My own favourite is VBCC, which is lightweight enough that I was able to write my own backend for my own toy CPU project, and even build the entire toolchain - assembler, linker and compiler - under AmigaOS.
For the remotely hosted dependency thing, I think it’s pretty easy to vendor dependencies in most realistic C contenders, and a really simple litmus test is just yanking your network cable and doing a fresh build.
The ecosystem thing can be a bigger deal, but again it really depends on the problem domain. There are lots of high quality, non-C libraries for C to always be a clear winner. I think it’s more important to take a step back and make sure whatever language you pick is well suited to the task, rather than assuming any individual one will always be. Knowing multiple languages is handy for this, since that’s more ecosystems that you can pick from, rather than just tying yourself to a single one.
Yes, absolutely - and of course C isn't immune to ecosystem problems, either. I remember the pain of working with GNU autotools back in the mid 2000s - in fact it's probably that experience (plus trying to use bleeding-edge tools written in Python!) that left me so cautious about external dependencies today.
VBCC's backend interface is well documented, which helps a lot - and there's a skeleton "generic RISC" backend which is trivial to copy and use as a starting point - I found it very useful to be able to tweak a working backend and observe how the generated code changes, while I was getting a feel for how it all hangs together.
VBCC does have an unusual license, however - commercial usage requires permission from the author.