That's exactly the point the pamphlet I linked to makes. C was far from the state of the art when it was invented, it's only major redeeming quality was that it

That's exactly the point the pamphlet I linked to makes. C was far from the state of the art when it was invented, it's only major redeeming quality was that it worked on the shit low-end computers that were available to the inventors back then. The tragedy wasn't that C was invented, it was fit for purpose then. The tragedy was that as HW evolved beyond the PDP-11 level, unix programming remained stuck at C.