Well, the answer to that is of course that C is not a modern language, it's already decades old. Of course there were subsequent versions of the standard that m

Well, the answer to that is of course that C is not a modern language, it's already decades old. Of course there were subsequent versions of the standard that modernized it somewhat, but there are only so many things you can do if you still want to call it "C". And I don't think most projects that still use C (e.g. the Linux kernel) are blind to this, but they had to continue to use it because of the lack of alternatives (that were suitable and had a big enough community). Maybe Rust will be able to establish itself as an alternative, now that it's officially supported for Kernel development?