The problems with C are real.
At the same time, the tooling has gotten much better in the last years.
Clang-analyzer is fast enough to run as part of the CI. Newer gcc also give quite a few more warnings for unused results.
My recommendation to the project is to
- Remove all compiler warnings and enable warning-as-error
- Increase the coverage of unit tests to >80%
That is a lot of work. But that's what is required for high-criticality systems engineering.