That's a rather arbitrary statement; C _compiles_ to machine code that maps pretty directly to an assembly language, which is normally not far off of the abstra

That's a rather arbitrary statement; C _compiles_ to machine code that maps pretty directly to an assembly language, which is normally not far off of the abstraction level offered by C. Taking the definition of transpile being translating to a language with a similar abstraction level, you're just picking hairs.