Eventually a lot of these people are going to age out, retire, or otherwise move on. I do think there will be a crisis moment at some point in the future.
I used to know C. It was my first language, and I spent a fair bit of time in it, but that was before compilers started to treat undefined behaviour as an excuse to break reality.
Arguably I'm not smart enough, or disciplined enough, to write C. This may be the case, and therefore I have naturally focused on other languages. Rust, to no-one's surprise, is my current favorite. I've never contributed to the kernel — for more reasons than just the language — but the language would be reason enough on its own.
C programmers are getting rare...
There’s plenty of people who write C, there’s plenty of newcomers who start writing C and if they’re willing to, they can find guidance, mentoring, and tooling to improve their skills. If that’s not the path you want to pursue, that’s fine. But C isn’t going anywhere soon and if you go to any university/college, there’s lots of C being taught and lots of people eager to learn.
the issue here is whether or not the broader community would ever seriously consider using an alternative, and whether contributors, particular commercial ones writing drivers for products, would ever agree to maintain two versions.