I'm one of the type of people Steve was describing, albeit not someone Steve knows - people who "used to be C folks, never really liked C++, but now happily write Rust instead of C".

Simplicity is really an "eye of the beholder" situation. In particular often (implicitly) implementation simplicity is meant, a lot of what was simple about C, especially K&R C and to an extent C89, is because a PDP-11 isn't very powerful. But while that simplicity is valuable to the compiler author (in the case of Odin, Ginger Bill) it doesn't have much value to users. Delivering simplicity in use through regularisation is expensive for the implementer.

For usage I worry that C-style simplicity comes in the form of just declining to explain the tricky corner cases. That is, I worry that if we documented all these cases properly, suddenly the "simpler" lowl level languages might look fiendishly complicated after all. Certainly I'm not confident that C was "really" simpler than Rust in many regards.