> Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct.

I'll quite happily say they were never fit for purpose. C had a role in bootstrapping early software development in the absence of anything better but once Lisp, Delphi, Smalltalk and Java arrived on the scene then it, and its equally footgunnable variants, should have been pushed to the margins where hardware constraint was the primary consideration.

Writing a browser in C++ in the 21st century was ridiculous and irresponsible.