I think if you learned to program 20 years ago or more you're likely to be faster at C than Python unless you jumped on Python in the Python2 days or earlier.

For me it's pretty hard to get in the flow with Python because I keep having to stop and read the documentation. I think this is just a personal thing but it's possible that Python may just be a significantly more complex language and that's driving some of it. I'm sure I'm not the only one like this.

There was a string heavy app I wrote years ago and I had multiple false starts in Python and then one day I just said "this needs to get done" and plowed through it in C nearly one shot in a couple hours. I've experienced this kind of thing multiple times. It's a little hard to really communicate how this feels.

EDIT: Yeah I think it really depends. I certainly do a lot of heavy numerical/ML stuff in Python just because that's where the libraries are (and IMO the libraries being written in python isn't a coincidence, it's a fantastic language for that.)

It's not just "string handling algorithms" though. I've written an entire web browser in straight C and it was mostly just walking through standards and coding. Maybe some of it is familiarity but I think part of the lack of familiarity comes from C just not having complex built-in data structures. There's no hashmap in C. There are no iterators in C etc. There's a tiny standard library to become familiar with and that's about it.