It sounds like we have no disagreement then? I'm well aware there are a lot of places C is used. My point is mostly that "waiting for someone else to fix it ..

It sounds like we have no disagreement then? I'm well aware there are a lot of places C is used. My point is mostly that "waiting for someone else to fix it ... if you don't want to fiddle with C" is probably a better strategy than becoming competent enough with C to fix your own problems. Becoming competent enough with C to diagnose and fix problems in production C codebases seems like it would be quite time consuming. Also, I work with SREs that debug problems with MySQL and Redis without knowing C or looking at C code. Unless you are actively contributing to those codebases it seems unlikely you need to know C.