My view is that the core of Pascal was actually the correct place to start rather than the core of C. C won out of Pascal purely because the original Pascal didn't fix its problems quick enough, and all of the successors also tried to focus on other fancier things like OOP or GC or whatever. C still remained "basic" and its preprocessor allowed for enough extensions for lacking language features, whilst not adding any of those fancier things.
For Odin, I tried to take the lessons of what I and others were emulating in C and just make them core constructs. Odin initially didn't have many of the constructs it has now such as parametric polymorphism or explicit procedure overloading, but all of them came about as a result of solving the problems people used the preprocessor for or other new features. For example, the explicit procedure overloading came about seeing how people use the (relatively new) C11 `_Generic` feature, and realizing that they were trying to emulate this aspect pretty much.
Odin also took a lot of the GNU C extensions and incorporated them directly (some of which are not in the latest version of C): `0b` literals, nested procedures (but not scope capturing), `type_of`, `case` ranges (`..<` and `..=` in Odin to be more explicit about the range bounds), array initializes with ranges, unnamed structs/unions, empty structs, and so much more.
Odin isn't a C++ alternative by any stretch, but I have seen a lot of C++ programmers really like it because it feels like it has just enough to make them feel at home whilst still have the control and more explicitness that C offers.