Do you have a link or reference? Doesn't appear to be on your blog?
C was indeed not ideal for 8 bitter (hence the astonishment around this topic). CP/M istself was written in PL/0 (I suppose with a sprinkle of assembler). Macro assemblers were popular then for shrink-wrap software. Custom software was often done in BASIC.
Professionals used cross compilers (or cross assemblers) when they had a chance. Microsoft BASIC e.g. was developed on a PDP-10.
This included graphics.
Circa 1989 so it was the backend of C64 development.
On one side most Pascal dialects did not have the issues he had with raw ISO Pascal.
And outside UNIX server rooms, all C implementations were also dialects anyway, so it should count both ways.
By the way, besides Small-C, have you also considered RatC, another dialect of it?