I see C as a minimally-viable HLL. Just the essential high level stuff – expression-oriented syntax (a huge thing over assembly), structured programming support

I see C as a minimally-viable HLL. Just the essential high level stuff – expression-oriented syntax (a huge thing over assembly), structured programming support (conditionals, loops), automatic storage management (no worries about what goes in registers and what goes at certain offsets in the stack frame), abstraction over calling conventions, and a rudimentary type system around scalars with a certain size and pointers pointing at them.