I think C is misleadingly easy: it's easy to reason about, say, a single function body since there's only so many things you can even write in C.

But when you start composing things together and juggling the lifetimes of various things, the complexity balloons and it becomes a lot harder to understand "spooky action at a distance"-type things. You might argue that with good structure and discipline it's still not difficult, but the assumptions are all implicit and you have to get into the mind of whoever wrote it in the first place to understand it. And I write a lot of C and still find it tricky when I have to go look at some random C codebase!