I feel like this is a bit of an https://xkcd.com/2501/ situation.
C is considered easy to pick up for the average user posting HN comments because we have the benefit of years -- the average comp sci student, who has been exposed to Javascript and Python, who might not know what "pass by reference" even means... I'm not sure they're going to be considering C easy.
Honestly, C seems to be one of the easier languages to teach the basics of. It's certainly easier than Java or C++, which have many more concepts.
C has some concepts that confuse the hell out of beginners, and it will let you shoot yourself in the foot very thoroughly with them (much more than say, Java). But you don't tend to encounter them till later on.
I have never said getting good at C is easy. Just that it's easy to pick up.
Just to provide another data point here... that C is a little easier to pick up, today, than it was in the 1990s or 2000s, when all you had was the K&R C book and a Linux shell. I regularly recommend CS50x to newcomers to programming via a guide I wrote up as a GitHub gist. I took the CS50x course myself in 2020 (just to refresh my own memory of C after years of not using it that much), and it is very high quality.
See this comment for more info: