As a former C# developer I would agree that life got easier with the introduction of generics, but you can develop the exact same software with and without generics.
Generics can drastically reduce the time required to implement features because less time is spent on re-implementing (nearly) identical algorithms for different data structures and more on simply using them to write something that works.
The cost paid for this is usually in the form of minor efficiency hits because data-specific efficiencies aren't exploited.
Also, consider me complaining about C's lack of generics. It is in fact the primary reason I prefer C++. If C had robust generics with reasonable syntax I'd strongly consider using it instead of C++.
And as somebody who developed in Java and C# before generics, those languages were awful before those features were added.
For the kind of work we do in 2014, yes.
People who would complain already know not to bother using C.